Environmental Communication for Children: Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-Human World (Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication) 3031046900, 9783031046902

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MEDIA AND ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION

Environmental Communication for Children

Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-Human World Erin Hawley

Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication Series Editors

Anders Hansen School of Media, Communication and Sociology University of Leicester Leicester, UK Steve Depoe McMicken College of Arts and Sciences University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH, USA

Drawing on both leading and emerging scholars of environmental communication, the Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication Series features books on the key roles of media and communication processes in relation to a broad range of global as well as national/local environmental issues, crises and disasters. Characteristic of the cross-disciplinary nature of environmental communication, the books showcase a broad variety of theories, methods and perspectives for the study of media and communication processes regarding the environment. Common to these is the endeavour to describe, analyse, understand and explain the centrality of media and communication processes to public and political action on the environment.

Erin Hawley

Environmental Communication for Children Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-­ Human World

Erin Hawley Deakin University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2634-6451     ISSN 2634-646X (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication ISBN 978-3-031-04690-2    ISBN 978-3-031-04691-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Klaus Vedfelt | Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Children, Nature, and the ‘Unliveable’ Future  1 2 Green  Time and Screen Time: Mapping the Relationship Between Children, Media, and Nature 31 3 Transformation  or Simplification: The Production of Environmental Knowledge in Children’s News 65 4 From  Knowledge to Efficacy: The Greening of Children’s Television 95 5 Nature  on Screen: Making ‘the Environment’ Visible in Children’s Film123 6 Young  Explorers in Virtual Ecosystems: Environmental Empathy in Animated and Digital Worlds155 7 The  Mainstreaming of Children’s Voices in Environmental Communication189

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8 Conclusion:  Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-Human World223 Index231

CHAPTER 1

Children, Nature, and the ‘Unliveable’ Future

It was a deeply per sonal moment in a sea of public-facing, highly mediatised debate at COP26. Dutch politician and Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, held up his phone during a speech to show the audience a photo of his one-year-old grandson. The two-week talks had run into overtime, and the delegates were exhausted as representatives from nearly 200 countries struggled to reach agreement on how best to tackle the planetary emergency. Timmermans took the opportunity to remind participants of the importance of holding global heating to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels. “If we fail”, he warned, his grandson and other children born today “will fight with other human beings for water and food. That’s the stark reality we face… 1.5°  C is about avoiding a future for our children and grandchildren that is unliveable” (quoted in Harvey et al. 2021). This act of sharing a family photo is one we might associate with a private gathering rather than a globally visible discussion of a politically, socially, and ecologically relevant issue. “This is personal”, Timmermans admitted to the listeners: “this is not about politics”. But the representational politics were powerful. The child—a specific child, a real child—was deployed here as the ‘face’ of climate change, and the moment was captured and reproduced by news outlets across the world, many of which displayed close-ups of the white-bearded Timmermans holding up both the media device and the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hawley, Environmental Communication for Children, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_1

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mediated image of the child. And while Timmermans’ phone allowed him to bring the silent presence of his grandson into the discussions, the streets of Glasgow outside were seething with protesting children who made their presence felt through speeches, chants, and home-made signs, gaining as much media attention as the speakers behind the conference walls. It is not surprising that children were so visible in media coverage of COP26, or that a delegate called upon an image of childhood during the talks. We are, indeed, experiencing a time of planetary emergency shadowed by what the United Nations has called the “triple crises” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation (United Nations Environment Programme 2021). Children are at the centre of this multifaceted crisis and even today they are feeling its effects more keenly than adults. Due to less-developed immune systems, children are physically more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on bodily health (Atapattu 2019; Kousky 2016), and young children are more likely than adults to be injured or killed in extreme weather events or slower onset disasters (Bartlett 2008: 503). In addition to these physical health issues— which in turn can lead to stress and distress (Clayton et al. 2017)—children who experience climate-related disasters and extreme weather events are impacted in terms of their access to education (Kousky 2016), while children who are part of Indigenous communities may experience anxiety over the threat not just to physical homes but to cultural heritage (Clayton et al. 2017: 31). Those children and young people who are not directly impacted by environmental problems may experience eco-anxiety or even have “nightmares” about climate change (Reuters 2020). These physical, mental, and emotional tolls on children and youth are accompanied by a steep financial burden, with experts estimating that climate change will cost today’s young people hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes (Phelan and Svenson 2021). Urgent voices, meanwhile, are calling for adult stakeholders to recognise children as rights-holders and change-agents in relation to the environment (Ryan et  al. 2021). The centrality of children to environmental issues has been acknowledged by UNICEF in a report calling for more “child-sensitive” climate policies which address the specific needs of children as a vulnerable group while also taking a “rights-based” approach (Pegram and Colon 2020: 5). At the same time, children have become a salient part of environmental messaging for adults and often appear as signifiers of hope or ‘the future’ in climate change mitigation campaigns (Bell 2014).

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In the midst of this growing visibility of ‘the child’ in conversations about the planetary crisis, children themselves have become an important market for environmentally themed media content. Recent years have seen a proliferation of environmental texts, products, and narratives for young people: children are positioned and addressed as audiences for environmental documentaries, cartoons, podcasts, and videogames; environmental problems are frequently covered by children’s news outlets and television programmes (see Chaps. 3 and 4), while works of eco-fiction flourish in the space of young adult literature (Rogers 2019), and even the makers of blockbuster children’s films seek ways of incorporating or acknowledging environmental themes (see Chap. 5). This is not new. Writing in 1990, Rosalind Coward observed: Books, guides, toys, T-shirts and TV programmes aimed at young greens all confidently assume that the link between youth and environmentalism is so strong that these products will be perceived as speaking for youth, rather than at them. (1990: 40)

Environmentalism, she tells us, is “indisputably youthful in its appeal” (1990: 40) and “[c]hildren and ecology are two terms that seem to go naturally together” because “[m]uch green rhetoric is about our children’s future” (1990: 41). Coward’s work is instructional here, particularly her argument that a “green morality” came to fill the place of a declining “middle class morality” in post-war Britain and America, becoming “grafted” onto children’s media products such as cartoons (1990: 41). Bell, similarly, has written about the way “environmental issues [in the late twentieth century] were seen as kids’ topics because it was assumed children had some connection to nature, but also that the new environmental politics was future-facing” (2014: 39). The prevalence of environmental themes and messages in children’s media during the 1980s and 1990s has also been documented by Starosielski, who observes that animated children’s films such as FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992) created “a cultural arena” where issues such as environmental degradation and conservation could be explored, helping to bring environmental discussions more fully into mainstream popular culture (2011: 150). Today, the production of children’s environmental media and the construction of children as ‘green’ audiences continues at a rapid pace—and intensifies—across film, television, news, magazines, and videogames and throughout transmedia franchises. This upsurge in children’s

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environmental media is accompanied by the emergence of climate communication campaigns directly targeting young people. In 2020, the United Nations launched its Climate Action Superhero social media campaign, which addresses children under the age of twelve and uses superhero figures—including ‘Truth Talker’, ‘Veggie Vindicator’, and ‘Fume Fighter’—to teach children about sustainability practices. Notable environmental communicators, too, are bypassing adults and directly targeting young audiences. In 2021, for example, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein published How to Change Everything: A Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other, a book which “adapts over twenty years of reporting and research on climate change and the movements that are trying to stop it” for young readers (Klein 2021). Klein, known for her influential writing on ecofeminism, consumption, and corporate globalisation, is here recognising the ability of “young humans” to engage with the complex meaning-making processes through which environmental crises are understood and mitigated. As we speed away from a time when topics like climate change were considered unsuitable for children due to their “doom and gloom” connotations (Samuelsson and Kaga 2008: 11), it is even argued that children may be the key to climate action as an easily reached audience with growing influence on older generations (Lawson et al. 2018). Children, then, are not just passive symbols to be evoked in environmental messaging for adults—they are audiences (and also communicators) with their own distinct needs, challenges, and roles to play. Little scholarly attention has yet been paid to children’s media or to mediatised depictions of childhood in the context of environmental communication, the study of which has otherwise flourished in recent decades (Cox and Depoe 2015). As environmental thought leaders increasingly recognise that “saving our planet is now a communications challenge”, in Sir David Attenborough’s words (quoted in BBC News 2021), environmental communication scholars seek to understand how meanings about ‘nature’ are constructed, reproduced, and shared (Hansen 2019; Pezzullo and Cox 2018; Parham 2016), with growing attention paid to the struggles of science communicators to reach diverse audiences (Yusuf and Burton 2021; Boykoff 2019) and to the environmental impact of media products and systems themselves (Cubitt 2005; Cubitt 2017; Walker and Starosielski 2016; López 2014). For the most part, though, children are missing from this transdisciplinary field of scholarship. Children’s media products, child-centric practices, youth-led initiatives, and young

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audiences are given little space in key writings about environmental communication, and through this often-unacknowledged omission, the public sphere discussed by environmental communication theorists is assumed to be an adult space where children are guests or intruders more often than they are participants. For example, in his comprehensive study of green popular culture, John Parham (2016) includes chapters on music, comedy, animation, and video games, as well as the usual suspects—film, television, and news—but avoids a close discussion of children’s media. Unusually, though, Parham identifies and explains this absence: the omission of a chapter on children’s media, he writes, is deliberate because an inclusion of this topic “would invoke a whole set of additional debates” (2016: xxi). What Parham is rightly hinting at here is that many of the problems and issues associated with the media/environment relationship become more complex, urgent, and politicised when we discuss them in relation to child audiences. As we shall see in the chapters ahead, children’s screen time as well as their ‘green time’ is policed, regulated, and controlled by adults—separately, children’s media consumption and their nature-time are objects of cultural obsession that evoke larger issues relating to health and well-being, learning and literacies, wealth and privilege, and environmental justice. These are difficult, complex topics to tackle and for this reason—along with their marginal position within communication studies more broadly—children do not have a secure place within the discipline of environmental communication. Increasingly, though, the nexus between children, media, and the environment demands attention. Children’s media contributes in interesting and complex ways to the production of meaning about environmental issues and the “more-than-human world” (Abram 1996), and at the same time as children are being constructed and addressed as environmentally aware audiences and green consumers, it is becoming more acceptable for their voices to be heard in conversations about the planetary crisis. The current generation of young media audiences is growing up in a climate emergency, certainly, but they are also growing up in a participatory media culture, exposed to a diversity of perspectives on topics such as climate change and equipped with the tools to articulate and share their own perspectives. It is therefore not surprising that over the past decade there has been a steep increase in youth-led environmental movements and in children’s engagement with environmental activism. Inspired largely by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, young people across the globe are marching, speaking, gathering,

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collaborating, writing stories, making films, and using various media tools to ensure that their contributions to environmental conversations—and their rights to contribute—are heard, seen, and felt. At the same event in which Frans Timmermans displayed the image of his grandson to the world, global leaders were addressed by twenty-three-year-old Samoan climate activist Brianna Fruean, whose participation in grassroots environmental movements (since the young age of eleven) earned her a place at the ‘grownup’ table, so to speak, during COP26. Meanwhile, as noted above, thousands of young people protested in the streets of Glasgow during the conference, a protest that culminated in Thunberg’s accusation of too much “blah, blah, blah” behind the conference walls. Thunberg’s comments and the actions of these young protestors—some as young as eight (see Katanich 2021)—received equal media attention to the speeches and decisions of adult world leaders during the conference, and resultantly, children were seen and heard throughout the deliberations. Arguably, the planetary crisis is an issue that has seen children become communicators on the world stage like never before. This mainstreaming of children’s voices in conversations about the environment accompanies the proliferation of children’s environmental media, and—as we will see in the chapters ahead—informs the production of many of these texts. This book explores the relationship between young audiences, media, and the more-than-human world. It does so through close examination of a variety of products and practices across the children’s media industries, culminating in a discussion of youth-led climate activism and an exploration of the narratives about intergenerational justice that are unfolding in media spaces and across media boundaries. In the chapters ahead, I consider how topics such as climate change are finding a place in children’s media, and I also identify children’s environmental media as a space within which ideas about childhood are constructed, policed, and occasionally, challenged. Ultimately, Environmental Communication for Children asks: where do children feature in the environmental politics of the twenty-first century and how is this impacting the narratives, representations, and meaning-making processes at work in children’s media?

‘Childhood’ and ‘Nature’ The intention of this introductory chapter is to provide context for the analyses ahead by mapping the relationship between children and nature. It is essential that we consider how this relationship has been culturally

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perceived, negotiated, and constructed, because such constructions inform (and are informed by) the production of children’s environmental media. I use the term ‘nature’ here with awareness of its complexities, its multiple connotations, and its vagueness. As Macnaghten and Urry remind us, there is no singular ‘nature’ as such, only a diversity of contested natures; and… each such nature is constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes from which such natures cannot be plausibly separated. (1998: 1)

Through social practices, humans “produce, reproduce and transform different natures” and respond to the signs of nature, and in this way ideas of nature are “fundamentally intertwined with dominant ideas of society” (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 2, 15). Importantly, humans tend to define nature by imagining their own place within or outside of it. We often understand nature to be “everything not made by humans”, although it can also be defined as “planetary ecosystems that support all life” (Elliott 2015: 34–35). For journalist and author Richard Louv, whose work I analyse in Chap. 2, nature is best defined as “natural wildness: biodiversity, abundance” (2010: 8–9), while for environmental psychologist Louise Chawla nature is “the world that humans have not created” (2009: 6) and “the ‘green world’ of forests, fields, farms, parks, and gardens—the elements of earth, water, air, and growing things that exist independent of human creation” (2002: 200). Studies have shown that children, too, tend to perceive nature as something pure, distant, wild, and untouched by humans, rather than as the ‘natural’ environments through which they move, live, and learn on a daily basis (Payne 2014; Phenice and Griffore 2003; Keliher 1997). The very act of defining nature, then, is often built upon assumptions about the separateness of humans, animals, plants, and machines—and upon the certainty of boundaries between living and non-living, organic and non- or (post-)organic. Once those boundaries start to thin, nature itself becomes harder to define. This leads to what environmentalist Bill McKibben has described as “the end of nature” (1989). Due to human tampering and anthropogenic change, McKibben writes, nature has already “ended” and therefore it is difficult to understand what we are fighting for when we try to save it: If nature were about to end, we might muster endless energy to stave it off; but if nature has already ended, what are we fighting for? Before any

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r­ edwoods had been cloned or genetically improved, one could understand clearly what the fight against such tinkering was about. It was about the idea that a redwood was somehow sacred, that its fundamental identity should remain beyond our control. But once that barrier has been broken, what is the fight about then? (1989: 922)

McKibben evokes an idea of (lost) nature by imagining a boundary between natural and artificial that should not be crossed; he also crafts a ‘fall’ narrative to frame our relationship with nature, suggesting that true nature is something unrecoverable, something we can only look back on, because we have already crossed that boundary many times. In other words, changes to the definition of ‘life’ stemming from social, scientific, and technological developments shake up understandings of the human/ nature relationship, creating fractures in long-held definitions of nature as something pure and wild to which humans belong, are removed from, and may or may not return to. I use the word ‘nature’ in this book because it evokes a human conceptualisation of the non-human world, but I use it with acknowledgement of the need for scholarship that traverses rather than policing the boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Donna Haraway’s early writings on the cyborg paved the way for such boundary-crossing scholarly practice. In a world where technology has made “thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial”, Haraway writes, “the certainty of what counts as nature—a source of insight and promise of innocence—is undermined, probably fatally” (2000: 293–294). Elsewhere, Haraway uses the term “natureculture” to describe the entanglement of human and non-­ human species (2003), while ecologist David Abram encourages us to rethink the conceptual gulf between human culture and non-human nature in his writings about “the more than human world” (1996). Abram’s term is useful because it reminds us of our position, as humans, within and not outside the natural world. The way we view and understand the more-than-human world, in turn, has been transformed by media including—as this book will demonstrate—media made for, by, or about children. The term ‘childhood’ is no simpler to define. This book acknowledges the definition of childhood outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, drafted in 1989, which states that a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years. This widely accepted definition of childhood has guided my choice of case studies throughout

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the book: in the chapters ahead, I am concerned primarily with products of the media industries that address audiences below the age of eighteen. However, we must also acknowledge that age alone is not a sufficient marker of the boundary of childhood, and that experiences and understandings of childhood differ across cultural groups; as Hopkins contends, young people “connect with and take up social identities other than age and so are also racialised, classed, gendered, sexualised and so on in particular ways in different spaces and times” (2010: 10). Like the related term ‘youth’, childhood can be described as both a “social process” (White et al. 2017: 5) and a “social identity” (Hopkins 2010: 6). Both childhood and youth are also “relational” concepts that only have meaning in proximity to adulthood: they refer to a state of transition or becoming, a temporary state of being, because a child, or a youth, must inevitably become an adult, and childhood itself must end (Wyn and White 1997). As adults, we can each individually understand childhood through a process of ‘looking back’ on our own past, yet childhood and youth are also often considered in terms of future contributions to society—children are “future consumers, future workers, future taxpayers” (Winograd 2016: 4). Moreover, the boundary between childhood and adulthood is itself socially and culturally constructed, as is the idea of “innocence” as a marker of childhood (Ariès 1998). There are constant negotiations over the meaning(s) of childhood, and media provides an arena in which many of these negotiations and constructions take place (Buckingham 2000: 6). When childhood is imagined, it is often imagined as being in proximity to nature. Children are assumed to have closer connections to the natural world than adults—either because they are born with such connections or because they will develop them ‘naturally’ as young humans. This notion of a child/nature connection can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who proposed, in his text Emile (1762/2010), that ‘Nature’ is an educator and that the child, whose connection to the natural world is a manifestation of “original innocence” (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 11), learns from ‘Nature’ before s/he has been shaped by society. Similar ideas were articulated in the twentieth century by marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson. In 1965, three years after her seminal book Silent Spring, Carson published The Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children, in which she reflects on the child’s innate appreciation of the natural world and the adult’s duty to foster the child’s inherent sense of wonder towards nature (1997). It is often perceived that external forces in the modern world erode the child’s sense of nature-relatedness,

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particularly in a time marked by urbanisation, indoor experiences, and high levels of media use, and consequently, the first decades of the twenty-­ first century have been marked by loud calls to restore the lost child/ nature connection. I will examine these calls more fully in Chap. 2. The child/nature connection has become written into the stories we tell about our present-time planetary crisis. In particular, the act of (re) connecting children with nature is often framed as a means of improving planetary as well as individual health. Across much of her work, Louise Chawla has argued that children need access to nature and experiences in the natural world, not just because these experiences are good for them, but in order to spark pro-environmental behaviour later in life (1998, 2007, 2009). Following in her footsteps, others have pointed out that contact with the natural world as a child leads to care for nature as an adult, and that emotional connections to nature formed in childhood inform pro-environmental behaviour in adulthood (Pergams and Zaradic 2006; Ives et al. 2018; Soga et al. 2016). This is why Louv describes the child-in-nature as “the future of environmentalism” (2010: 233) and an “endangered indicator species” which must be ‘saved’ in order to ‘save’ both the environment and environmentalism itself (2010: 159). Rachel Carson, too, proposed that pro-environmental behaviour arises from the positive feelings experienced by humans in nature, because people will ultimately protect what they love: “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us,” Carson once stated, “the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race” (1998: 94). Such sentiments of wonder, love, and care are not solely experienced in childhood, but they can be described as childlike feelings or ways of seeing because they are born out of (or associated with) this supposedly ‘natural’ connection between children and the natural world. Articulating the same idea decades later, David Attenborough declared “no one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced” (quoted in Williams 2013). While Attenborough was speaking about the power of wildlife documentaries—screen media texts—to provide the sort of ‘experiences’ that cultivate a sense of care for nature, others, including Chawla and Carson, have been primarily concerned with the child’s unmediated presence in the natural world (and the unmediated presence of nature in the child’s life). Critics of this argument, though, have problematised the “chain of causation” in which experience in nature is seen to lead directly to care for nature which in turn leads to pro-environmental action—because

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arguably, any one of the links in this “chain” can break (Fletcher 2017: 3). It is also problematic to think of ‘placing’ the child in nature as a purely positive experience and an easy solution to complex environmental problems. Chawla herself reminds us that “children’s encounters with nature include witnessing environmental degradation and destruction” (2020: 620), and are therefore not always positive or simple. She argues that we must see the child/nature relationship in terms of loss and grief, which is also an expression of care and nature-connectedness: “young people’s fears and worries about environmental risks and losses also express a sense of connection with nature”, she writes, arguing that it is possible for young people to develop a sense of “constructive hope” that enables them to deal with the uncertainty and pain of the environmental crisis in a productive and action-oriented way (2020: 620). Altogether, with the planet’s well-being at stake along with the very idea of childhood itself, it is little wonder that debates and discussions about the child/nature (dis)connection are fuelled by such a sense of urgency. If children are believed to have an inherent nature connection, the possibility of a decline of child-in-nature time is sure to be culturally alarming—a threat to the idea of childhood itself, and a threat to ‘the future’, rather than a change in how childhood is experienced and lived. In the chapters ahead, I will demonstrate that such cultural imaginings shape the production of children’s environmental media, and they also shape public discussions about children’s relationship with media—for, as we shall see in Chap. 2, media itself is deeply entangled in the child/ nature narrative, and any consideration of the relationship between children, nature, and media must contend with the assumption that screens, digital devices, and virtual worlds impinge upon or otherwise reduce children’s ‘nature time’. Interestingly, though, and perhaps paradoxically, the romanticising of the child/nature connection sometimes leads to a perception that it is the job of storytellers and those with cultural influence (like media-makers) to nurture this connection. Likewise, the assumption that children are or should be connected to nature has led to the positioning of children as audiences for green media content and to the construction of ‘the environment’ as a topic of interest for children. This can be traced back to the eighteenth century and the emergence of children’s literature itself. Many early works of literature for children assumed that young readers had “an inherent love of the natural world” (Bell 2014: 38) and were born with a sense of curiosity about nature. Bell observes that Christian publishers

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particularly favoured nature as a subject for young readers because “examination of the natural world was assumed to lead easily to contemplation of the Creator” (2014: 38), while Hollindale points out that the “growth of scientific interest in the natural world” during the eighteenth century saw the incorporation of nature-based themes into texts produced by the then-fledgling industry of children’s literature (2011: 161). In particular, the eighteenth century saw what Spencer calls a “flowering of animal narrative” within children’s fiction (2010: 470). Non-human animals featured frequently in early children’s books, and such animal stories were used to teach morals as well as to convey scientific knowledge (Cosslett 2002; Spencer 2010). Children’s magazines, too, tended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to popularise topics such as science and natural history (Dixon 2001: 228–229). Adkins points out that writers and editors of early children’s periodicals believed “responsible treatment of the natural world was an important part of the future” and sought to impart “traditional ways of appreciating nature” along with “calls for an ethical relationship with the natural world” (2004: 42). There is, then, a long history behind the reproduction of nature in educational and/or entertainment-based texts for children, and this history is built upon the assumption of an inherent child/nature connection. However, in today’s time of environmental crisis, nature itself is “forcibly acquiring new meanings” relating to degradation, loss, and risk, and these new meanings have themselves come to pervade children’s stories (Hollindale 2011: 164; see also Sigler 1994; Wagner-Lawlor 1996). Coward notes: Animals and natural history have always been areas where children’s knowledge has been encouraged… But what is different now is that animals, natural history and conservation have come together with wider issues about the environment and global resources which require more political and scientific understanding. (1990: 41)

With these shifts in the meaning of ‘nature’ comes a change in the production of children’s cultural content, marked at times by attempts by media-makers and storytellers to equip young audiences with precisely the political and scientific understandings that will enable them to understand these “wider issues” (to use Coward’s words). As this book will demonstrate, these changing meanings of ‘nature’—together with shifts in understandings of childhood (most notably, a dislodging of ‘innocence’ as the

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primary marker of a child’s identity)—have led to an inrush of environmental themes into the space of children’s media and culture, and to complex negotiations over which (and whose) environmental ‘meanings’ are appropriate, necessary, or desirable for children. It is for this reason that children’s media and its relationship with the more-than-human world should be (re)examined in the context of a time of planetary crisis.

Media, Memory, and Intergenerational Connections The child/nature relationship is one that invites us to think about space: children in natural spaces; children’s access to wild and green spaces. We can even think of childhood itself as a space—one that is populated or inhabited by children. The adult attitude to this space of childhood is mixed: as adults, we may feel nostalgic about childhood, or we may romanticise it; we may feel confused about contemporary childhood because it does not resemble the space we inhabited when we were young; we may spend a lot of time in or near this space as adults if we are parents, teachers, or have young children in our lives—alternatively, childhood may be a place we rarely visit. We may seek to protect this childhood space and fiercely guard its boundaries. We may simplify childhood and refuse to recognise its complexities, or we may have a deep respect for them. Perhaps we find this space of childhood unknowable, labyrinthine, difficult to navigate or even to perceive. However, we also need to think about the child/nature relationship in terms of time, and in particular, we must consider how notions of temporality, memory, and futurity shape the way adults respond to and act upon the child’s connection with nature (or lack thereof). A sense of elegy can surround the child/nature relationship when seen through adult eyes. As Carson puts it in The Sense of Wonder, A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. (1997)

The child, for Carson, has a unique way of seeing nature that is both precious and ephemeral; the child’s-eye view of nature is an object of desire for adults as well as an impossibility, something we may remember but can never fully recall. More broadly, childhood is part of how we

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adults understand our own connections to nature—and it is also how we understand what has been lost. At times, media facilitates this elegiac view of the child/nature relationship. Consider a recent interactive news package from the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster, released in December 2019 under the headline “See how global warming has changed the world since your childhood” (Leslie et  al. 2019). This story uses data from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology to visualise the changing of temperatures in relation to the reader’s own lifetime. Readers are invited to activate childhood memories and reflect on their own childhood as a touchpoint, while also seeing the climate crisis through a child’s eyes. “Think back to when you were six”, the news story invites me (after I type in my year of birth): By this point you’ve seen a few summers, probably run through a few sprinklers, burnt your feet on hot pavement—six-year-old you knows what hot feels like. Well, not compared to a six-year-old today, you don’t. They’ve lived through four of the five hottest years in Australia; you were 33 years old before you experienced the warming they lived through in the first year of their life.

Harnessing the power of childhood memory as a tool for environmental communication, this story also displays a remarkable sense of empathy across generations. Understanding climate change here involves the adult reader aligning themselves with the experiences of children today but also reflecting on child/nature experiences of the past. The story dances forward and backward in time: in attempting to humanise the issue of climate change—a central goal in climate communication—these journalists tap into memories of childhood while activating both a sense of loss and a recognition of the challenges faced by the world’s current and future children. Discussions about the environmental crisis in all its complexity are often undertaken with eyes on the future. At its worst, this future-focus invokes a shifting of responsibility from present to future generations. This manifests in the attitude that climate change is the future generations’ problem—that the children of today must solve this problem while the adults of today continue living their lives without change. At its best and most productive, the sense of futurity in environmental discourse ignites a call for intergenerational justice, where members of one generation work to ensure that the succeeding generation will have access to well-being,

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safety, and a life of meaning and value. Intergenerational justice “requires us to ensure that when taking developmental decisions today, the rights of future generations will not be jeopardised by our actions” (Atapattu 2019: 168). It is connected with sustainability and the notion that “[t]o live sustainably is to act with an expansive temporal and geographic awareness” (Thiele 2016: 3), a recognition that our present-day actions impact future generations as well as people in far-off places. For many adults, this understanding may encompass an awareness of our duty to children and grandchildren: this is precisely the awareness that Frans Timmermans was activating by sharing the photo of his grandson during the COP26 deliberations. At times, such a reading of intergenerational justice unwittingly normalises narrow visions of sustainability that centre around heteronormative, even patriarchal relationships (epitomised by a male spokesperson referring to his grandson). But intergenerational justice also calls upon us adults to think about our connection to generations as yet unborn, whether or not they are our direct descendants: a challenging act of imagination and empathy. The children of today and their present-time experiences can therefore come to represent or stand in for the unborn future generations who cannot be seen or heard and are difficult to imagine. As we shall see in Chap. 7, the rhetoric of youth-led environmental movements such as the aptly named Fridays for Future is often future-­ focused, in keeping with these discourses of intergenerational justice. However, the past plays a powerful role in environmental discourse too. McKibben, for example, tells us—somewhat harshly—that “[t]here is no future in loving nature” (1989: 923), but he also argues that the so-called end of nature will come when we no longer remember or understand the sense of wonder that humans experienced in the past. “The loss of memory”, he writes, “will be the eternal loss of meaning” (1989: 924). As noted above, memories of childhood experiences in nature play a powerful role in activating our environmental awareness and behaviour as adults (Chawla 1998). But if ‘remembering nature’ is such a crucial driver of pro-environmental behaviour, we must ask the question: can children remember a nature they have not experienced? Like adults, children can certainly experience “solastalgia”, that sense of “place-based distress” (Albrecht 2005: 44) over the loss of significant natural places; this might be experienced, for example, by a child whose local environment is destroyed by fire or flood. But this is a present-time experience. Is it accurate to say that children cannot perceive the environmental crisis in the same way that adults can because they do not possess the same depth of

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nature-memory, accumulated over a lifetime? In other words, today’s young people can certainly fight for their future, but do they truly understand what has already been lost? Peter Kahn’s work on ‘generational amnesia’ provides a useful framework for addressing these questions. In 2002, Kahn conducted interviews with children about their understanding of the natural environment. Using the results of this research, he argued that as children, we formulate our own conceptualisation of ‘the land’ and this stays with us as we grow up, but we often do not have access to previous generations’ conceptualisations of ‘the land’. Consequently, even if we grow up experiencing a natural environment with some level of pollution, we will still hold that up as the ideal against which later states of pollution are measured: we all take the natural environment we encounter during childhood as the norm against which we measure environmental degradation later in our lives. With each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation in its youth takes that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition—as the normal experience. (2002: 106)

This “amnesia” may make it difficult for us to understand the magnitude of environmental problems (2002: 108). It may even lead us to “adapt” to the loss of nature as we continue to degrade the environment (2002: 109). If, then, children are no longer growing up with some access to non-polluted natural spaces, what will happen to the willingness and ability of the human race to tackle environmental problems? Intergenerational relationships and narratives become deeply important here. As we will see in Chap. 2, the child/nature relationship is sometimes seen in terms of a generational break, a clear split between today’s young people and past generations whose experiences with nature were richer and fuller; but perhaps, rather than agonising over such a generational split, we should instead turn our attention to interactions and connections between generations as the key to empowering today’s young people in the fight for nature preservation and a sustainable future. Engaged conversations between generations, Kahn writes, can “provide a means for children to gain information (otherwise unavailable in a direct experiential way) from which they can construct more veridical understandings of the natural world” (2002: 112). In other words, rather than simply restoring the ‘lost’ relationship between child and nature, it may be more productive to find ways of sharing nature-memories across generations. This can be

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enabled, for example, by the collection and sharing of oral histories. Indeed, an oral history of environmental place-memories may start just such a generational exchange, teaching children about what has been lost (Endres 2011; Williams and Riley 2020). In this way, media technologies (including those involved in the recording, archiving, and circulating of oral history interviews) can play a role in preserving past stories of the child/nature relationship and making them accessible to future generations. Children’s media, literature, and culture can also play a role in activating intergenerational memories. We find a spectacular example of this in Lost Words, a book created in 2017 by British authors Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris in response to the disappearance of words describing nature from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Using visual artworks together with poetry, the book restores the missing words, which include ‘acorn’, ‘bluebell’, ‘kingfisher’, and ‘wren’—a rewriting of nature back into the text of childhood. The book (and the media attention it received) ignited public interest in environmental literacy and in the connection between textual and natural experiences. Importantly, the website for the Lost Words project describes the book as “a much broader protest at the loss of the natural world around us”, a reminder of the way the child/nature relationship is often dragged centrally into cultural discussions about the broader loss of (a human connection with) nature. Lost Words also provides us with an example of how media and storytelling can be used to close the (perceived) gap between children and nature. The narrative of Lost Words, meanwhile, spills across, and in and out of, media spaces. Not just a book, Lost Words is a transmedia project—it involves a touring exhibition of the artwork and poems featured in the book, as well as Spell Songs, the book’s “musical companion piece”, and a Kickstarter campaign to bring the book into British schools (The Lost Words 2017). Digital tools (including the project’s website and various social media platforms) are used to build awareness of book and its related live performances, and to enhance their impact. For example, Eva John’s e-book Explorers Guide to the Lost Words, which can be accessed online and downloaded for free, is designed to “help get children (and nonchildren) looking, learning, making and dreaming about the natural world and our part in it” and readers of the book are urged to “Take it outside! Take it on expeditions, on walks, out into the school grounds” (2017: 4). This very act of ‘taking’ an e-book—a media object—‘outside’ both confirms and disrupts cultural myths about the child/nature (­dis)

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connection. On the one hand, the suggestion is that this digital reading experience can only be considered healthy or useful if it occurs outdoors; on the other hand, the mobility of the media devices on which children might access an e-book can enable intersections between ‘media’ and ‘nature’ that go far beyond the simple act of staring at a screen indoors instead of engaging in outdoor play. We glimpse here the depth of the entanglement between children, media, and nature. Such texts, and moments, are shadowed by understandings of what it means to be a child in a time of environmental crisis and a time of high media consumption; a time when the production of meaning about the environment for children is still largely controlled by adult stakeholders with various intentions, but where significant shifts are taking place in public understandings of the media’s role in maintaining or restoring the child/nature relationship, as well as the role children themselves might play in ensuring the future remains ‘liveable’. The evocation of Timmermans’ grandson at COP26 represents another such shift—an indication that it is culturally acceptable for children to be present and visible during political discussions about the environmental crisis, and a reminder that media itself makes porous the boundaries between adult and child, nature and culture, and public and private experiences of environmental problems. When Timmermans shared the image of his grandson, he was ostensibly using the ‘idea’ of childhood as inspiration and motivation for adults to do better; however, ‘the child’ also functioned in this moment as a sign of an ecologically and socially unwell world—for a future in which children must fight for food and water is a future in which the human disconnection from nature and the corruption of childhood innocence have reached their respective peaks. Meanwhile, just as the eyes of the world were on this mediated image of the child, the eyes of children were on COP26, which received extensive coverage in children’s news outlets and the key themes of which were reproduced in a plethora of children’s media texts. Today, therefore, the child/nature relationship incorporates more than the child’s unique way of seeing the natural world—it involves the child learning to see and respond to a future that may indeed be unliveable.

Methodology and Chapter Overview In the chapters ahead, I investigate the many points of intersection between children, media, the more-than-human world, and the ‘unliveable’ future, through a close analysis of a range of case studies. Chapter 2

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proposes that the relationship between children, media, and nature has become an object of both anxiety and fascination for adults. In this chapter I interrogate cultural concerns about the child/media/nature nexus, attending to the “nature deficit disorder” (Louv 2010), misinformation, and the commercialisation of childhood. While not dismissing these as real or valid concerns, the chapter articulates a need to move outside the media effects paradigm in order to more fruitfully examine the relationship between media and environmental literacies. Building on these assertions, Chaps. 3 and 4 investigate children’s news and children’s television, respectively, exploring the adaptation and transformation of environmental content, as well as the production of environmental knowledge, that we find in these distinct spaces. In these chapters, I propose that media can contribute productively to the building of environmental literacies, but I also begin to expose problems with the ‘curious child’ viewing position that is constructed, at times, by the makers of children’s environmental media. In Chap. 5, I consider how children’s films support the development of environmental knowledge by encouraging certain ways of seeing the more-than-human world. I also explore what happens when children’s films obscure or refuse to ‘see’ environmental problems. My concern in Chap. 6 is with another aspect of environmental literacy: the qualities or mindsets that allow humans to feel empathy with the non-human world. Here, I take up the question of whether mediated or “vicarious” (Kellert 2002) experiences with nature can contribute to the development of environmental sensitivity and nature-connectedness. I bring this conundrum into my discussion of animated and digital representations of nature across children’s screen media. Then, in Chap. 7, I shift my attention from the children’s media industries to the discursive practices of young people as environmental communicators. Here, I argue that the growing role of child activists as spokespeople on the topic of climate change is destabilising traditional understandings of childhood that have kept children on the margins of ‘serious, adult’ discussions of such topics. This final chapter examines the “representational politics” (Giroux 1996) of youth and childhood in relation to climate activism and argues that while mainstream media representations of youth climate activism tend to confirm the adult/ child boundary, the young activists themselves often draw power from their ability to cross that boundary strategically and at will. Throughout the book, I argue that the narratives of intergenerational justice that have

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been sparked by youth climate activism are imprinting upon the production of meaning about the more-than-human world in children’s media. This book does not claim to offer a comprehensive or encyclopaedic overview of children’s environmental media. Indeed, it recognises that environmental themes pervade children’s culture and have done so for many decades, making it a mammoth task to track every single children’s media text that engages with environmental issues. It is more productive, and the aim of this book, to explore the connections between children’s media and the environment and to consider how, when, and why children’s media might open spaces for environmental communication. Case study analysis of representative texts—an approach that enables “in-depth and comprehensive examination” (Weerakkody 2015: 256) of the child/ media/nature relationship—has allowed me to meet this objective. Textual analysis is employed as a tool in this examination process, and I recognise here that textual analysis can provide insight into the production of meaning, pleasure, and power, particularly by revealing “systems of signification” (Phillipov 2013: 218–220). As Fürsich observes in her “defense” of textual analysis as a research method, media texts “present a distinctive discursive moment between encoding and decoding that justifies special scholarly engagement” (2009: 238). With this in mind, textual analysis is used in each chapter to investigate the representational strategies at work in children’s environmental media and the salience given to environmental problems in these texts. This approach recognises that children’s media texts are repositories of thought about the child/nature relationship as well as a means of reconfiguring this relationship; they are also important sites for the construction of childhood itself. The case studies in this book were chosen for analysis because they contribute to the production of meaning about the more-than-human world for young audiences—that is, they can be described as engaging in environmental communication for children. My goal here is to explore the representational patterns and politics at work in children’s environmental media, rather than to identify the deliberate strategies used by media-­ makers to reach and persuade children—although, of course, the two are intertwined. Consequently, some of my chosen case studies are entertainment products that seek to thrill, enchant, or divert young audiences, while others can be described as factual texts or works of ‘edutainment’ because they seek to inform or educate children. Not all of my case studies engage in pro-environmental messaging, but all of them represent the more-than-human world and thus mediate the child/nature relationship.

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It is important to note at the outset that the majority of my case studies are produced in the Anglophone West; some, such as the Australian television programme Project Planet (see Chap. 4), are unlikely to be known outside their local context, while others, such as the Disney film Moana (see Chap. 5), have enjoyed global success and impact. These case studies have been chosen because they are indicative of trends informing the creation of environmental content for children in major centres of media production in the Global North. It is my hope that others will map this theoretical framework and approach against their own cultural perspectives, for there remains much work to be done on children’s environmental media in non-Western cultures and production contexts. I do not claim in this book that children’s environmental media is a ‘genre’ or that there is a clear line separating children’s media texts that engage with environmental issues or problems from those that do not. Arguably, environmental media should not be thought of as a genre, but rather as an imperative across children’s media, involving all writers and production teams. Research has shown that television, for example, can “act as an ecological socialising agent” for children, especially when characters “habitually incorporate green behaviour into their usual routines” (Oates et al. 2013: 37–45). In other words, characters in children’s media can model sustainability practices and normalise pro-environmental behaviour even when environmental messaging is not the core goal of the text. In this vein, BAFTA Albert (2021), a British organisation dedicated to sustainability within the screen industries, has identified two opportunities facing content creators—to tell positive stories about sustainability and to ensure content is not unduly normalising unsustainable behaviour. While the reference here is not specifically to children’s media, an example is given in the form of the children’s television programme His Dark Materials (2019–2022), a big-budget adaptation of Philip Pullman’s series of fantasy novels. Albert calls attention to a scene in which the two child characters, Lyra and Will, walk along a street where posters can be seen in the background featuring an image of a polar bear and the words “Saving the Arctic”. We can read this example in two ways. Firstly, it is a demonstration of the ease with which environmental messages can be embedded in the production design, set design, and art direction of any television programme, and of how such aspects of the craft of screen production can be seen as (often overlooked) opportunities for the communication of pro-environmental messages. In particular, the interweaving of such messages about climate change into the visual and spatial dimensions

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of the storyworld indicates that when it comes to communicating about the environment or constructing a sense of environmental responsibility, worldbuilding, production design, casting, and promotional materials can be used alongside more conventional communication tools like plot, theme, and character. Secondly, though, this example demonstrates that the narratives and thematic patterns of children’s culture open deeper opportunities for environmental messaging that support the sort of superficial communication that this poster otherwise represents. The poster’s simple message is not detached from the narrative of His Dark Materials, a fantasy text involving both human and animal characters including the giant ice bear Iorek Byrnison. The main character of this series, Lyra Belacqua, is depicted in relation to the more-than-human world as both a protector and a fighter and has been compared by writers of the television series to climate activist Greta Thunberg because both girls are a “force of nature” seeking to change the world for good (Flood 2019). While embedding references to the environmental crisis into its visual narrative is certainly a means by which this children’s television programme achieves pro-environmental aims, and while this is a strategy that could be adopted more widely across all genres of children’s media, we must also keep in mind that as a fantasy text, His Dark Materials is more open to addressing the environmental crisis—at times directly, and at times through play, subversion, or analogy—due to the connections between fantasy and ecocriticism (Ulstein 2015). This is a point I will explore throughout the book, because indeed, children’s culture opens up possibilities for addressing environmental problems (and solutions) in a fuller, more unflinching manner than many adult texts, precisely because it leans more towards the fantastic than adult culture does. For the most part, the chapters ahead are clearly bounded by their focus on a particular type or form of children’s media (such as news, television, or film); however, I am equally concerned with the flow of children’s content across media boundaries, a flow of content that is driven by industry professionals as well as by young media consumers, activists, and citizen media-makers. Researchers have acknowledged that children’s media tends towards transmedia expansion (Kinder 1991; Herr-Stephenson et al. 2013; Alper and Herr-Stephenson 2013), and this has informed my decision to analyse a variety of children’s content and to investigate the way the narratives, characters, and ideas expressed in children’s media circulate and unfold across media boundaries. Analysis of “paratexts” (Gray

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2010) has also played an important part in my investigation of these case studies. In particular, analysis of the critical reception of children’s environmental texts has provided a useful means of determining how these texts sparked public discussion, while analysis of promotional paratexts— such as media interviews, trailers, media kits, and press releases—has allowed me to consider the industry contexts within which children’s media texts are produced, and the intentions that guide their production, promotion, and reception. The objects, devices, products, and texts of children’s media deserve critical investigation in the context of environmental communication, not least because their production leads to environmental damage, and because they are often steeped in ideologies that are not conducive to pro-­ environmental change. The chapters ahead will show that children’s media can indeed contribute to the production of meaning about the environment, but also that children’s media texts are replete with messages and representations that align with capitalist ideologies or that otherwise position children within markets as consumers (Hill 2011; Kapur 2005; McAllister and Giglio 2005). It is therefore important that analysis of such texts is undertaken in a way that acknowledges and resists their pleasures, or their existence as objects of nostalgia for the adult researcher. As Drout points out in his discussion of fantasy texts, analysts who are both “lovers and scholars” of the textual objects they analyse “run the risk of being cheerleaders” rather than critical investigators (2011: 18). A similar point is made by Bell and co-authors about the analysis of Disney films, which are often veiled in wonder and childlike joy: “only when we ‘break the spell’ that places Disney in critically untouchable territory”, they write, “can we, as cultural critics of film, interrogate the ‘magic’ there” (1995: 2; see also Zipes 1995). I, too, am keen to “break the spell” surrounding the often analytically untouchable products of the children’s media industries and I am not a cheerleader, but neither do I assume there is only one way to read children’s media. I am mindful that scholarship of children’s media—in particular, analysis of children’s environmental texts—has at times taken a mistrustful approach. Popular children’s films, especially, have been read in a way that denies or suppresses their capacity for authentic environmental engagement, most commonly by foregrounding the commercial motifs of production companies, studios, and conglomerates like Disney (see Moore 2016; Fritz 2020). Indeed, the term ‘Disneyfication’ is often quickly employed in analyses of children’s culture and has become shorthand for a process by which media-makers reduce children’s stories

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or strip them of meaning. While we can certainly talk of the Disneyfication of nature or the Disneyfication of environmental themes—and in this book, I will—we must also not “foreclose on other potential readings” when it comes to understanding the significance of children’s media, as Tamaira puts it in her analysis of the Disney film Moana (2018: 307). To assume that children’s media can never contribute to pro-environmental communication is to deny the complexity of these texts and to repeat problematic assumptions that children—and their stories—are somehow outside the realm of real-world ‘adult’ concerns. This will stop us from asking the crucial question: what can we learn from children’s media about environmental communication? This book has resisted the cheerleader position, but as Chap. 2 will demonstrate, it also resists the compulsion to blame media for negative effects on children. It seeks to find a middle space, which takes a critical eye but also treats children’s culture and children’s storytelling with the respect it deserves, rather than assuming that no productive ideas about complex topics could ever emerge from this childlike space. In doing so, it leans towards the positive, because it finds in children’s media a world of possibility. It recognises that children’s media-makers are, at times, driven by the need to tell environmental stories—perhaps even more powerfully, it recognises that children as audiences are interested in these stories and that this audience need is driving production: that the centrality of children within conversations about the environment, mentioned at the start of this chapter, as well as the mainstreaming of children’s voices in these conversations—which I will detail in Chap. 7—is imprinting upon the production of children’s media in interesting and complex ways. It is this complexity that the book explores.

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———. 2009. Growing Up Green: Becoming an Agent of Care for the Natural World. The Journal of Developmental Processes 4 (1): 6–23. ———. 2020. Childhood Nature Connection and Constructive Hope: A Review of Research on Connecting with Nature and Coping with Environmental Loss. People and Nature 2: 619–642. Clayton, Susan, Christie Manning, Kirra Krygsman, and Meighen Speiser. 2017. Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. Washington DC: American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica. Cosslett, Tess. 2002. Child’s Place in Nature: Talking Animals in Victorian Children’s Fiction. Nineteenth Century Contexts 23 (4): 475–495. Coward, Rosalind. 1990. Greening the Child. New Statesman and Society 3 (102): 40–41. Cox, Robert, and Stephen Depoe. 2015. Emergence and Growth of the Field of Environmental Communication. In The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication, ed. Anders Hansen and Robert Cox, 13–25. London: Routledge. Cubitt, Sean. 2005. Eco Media. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. ———. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dixon, Diana. 2001. Children’s Magazines and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Victorian Periodicals Review 34 (3): 228–238. Drout, Michael D.C. 2011. ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ Seventy-five Years Later. Mythlore 30 (1–2): 5–22. Elliott, Sue. 2015. Children in the Natural World. In Young Children and the Environment: Early Education for Sustainability, ed. Julie M.  Davis, 32–54. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Endres, Danielle. 2011. Environmental Oral History. Environmental Communication 5 (4): 485–498. Fletcher, Robert. 2017. Gaming Conservation: Nature 2.0 Confronts Nature-­ deficit Disorder. Geoforum 79: 153–162. Flood, Alex. 2019. His Dark Materials: Lyra is like Greta Thunberg, says writer Jack Thorne. NME, October 16. Accessed October 13, 2021. https://www. nme.com/news/lyra-­his-­dark-­materials-­jack-­thorne-­greta-­thunberg-­2557557. Fritz, Alice Marianne. 2020. ‘Buy Everything’: The Model Consumer-citizen of Disney’s Zootopia. Journal of Children and Media 14 (4): 475–491. Fürsich, Elfriede. 2009. In Defense of Textual Analysis: Restoring a Challenged Method for Journalism and Media Studies. Journalism Studies 10 (2): 238–252. Giroux, Henry A. 1996. Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of Display. The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 18 (3): 307–331. Gray, Jonathon. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

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Hansen, Anders. 2019. Environment, Media and Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2000. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-­ feminism in the late Twentieth Century. In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 291–324. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harvey, Fiona, Damian Carrington, Severin Carrell, Oliver Milman, and Libby Brooks. 2021. COP26 in Extra Time as Leaders Warn of the Deadly Cost of Failure. The Guardian, November 13. Accessed December 1, 2021. https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/12/cop26-­in-­extra-­time-­as-­ leaders-­warn-­of-­the-­deadly-­cost-­of-­failure. Herr-Stephenson, Becky, Meryl Alper, and Erin Reilly. 2013. T is for Transmedia: Learning Through Transmedia Play. Los Angeles and New  York: USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and Joan Ganz Cooney Centre at Sesame Workshop. Hill, Jennifer Ann. 2011. Endangered Childhoods: How Consumerism is Impacting Child and Youth Identity. Media, Culture & Society 33 (3): 347–362. Hollindale, Peter. 2011. Nature. In Keywords for Children’s Literature, ed. Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, 161–164. New York and London: New York University Press. Hopkins, Peter. 2010. Young People, Place and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Ives, Christopher D., David J. Abson, Henrik von Wehrden, Christian Dorninger, Kathleen Klaniecki, and Joern Fischer. 2018. Reconnecting with Nature for Sustainability. Sustainability Science 13 (5): 1389–1397. John, Eva. 2017. An Explorer’s Guide to the Lost Words. Pitlochry: The John Muir Trust. Kahn, Peter H. 2002. Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia. In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, ed. Peter Kahn and Stephen Kellert, 93–116. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Kapur, Jyotsna. 2005. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Katanich, Doloresz, with Reuters. 2021. “People Won’t Survive Anymore”: These Kids Know What’s on the Line at COP26. Euronews, October 25. Accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/10/22/people-­ won-­t-­survive-­anymore-­these-­kids-­know-­what-­s-­on-­the-­line-­at-­cop26. Keliher, Vicki. 1997. Children’s Perceptions of Nature. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 6 (3): 240–243. Kellert, Stephen R. 2002. ‘Experiencing Nature: Affective, Cognitive, and Evaluative Development in Children.’ In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, ed. Peter H. Kahn and Stephen R. Kellert, 117–151. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

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Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Klein, Naomi. 2021. How to Change Everything. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://naomiklein.org/how-­to-­change-­everything/. Klein, Naomi, and Rebecca Stefoff. 2021. How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other. London: Penguin. Kousky, Carolyn. 2016. Impacts of Natural Disasters on Children. Future of Children 26 (1): 73–92. Lawson, Danielle F., Kathryn T. Stevenson, M. Nils Peterson, Sarah K. Carrier, Renee Strnad, and Erin Seekamp. 2018. Intergenerational Learning: Are Children Key in Spurring Climate Action? Global Environmental Change 53: 204–208. Leslie, Tim, Joshua Byrd, and Nathan Hoad. 2019. See How Global Warming Has Changed the World Since Your Childhood. ABC News, December 6. Accessed October 26, 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-­12-­06/ how-­climate-­change-­has-­impacted-­your-­life/11766018?nw=0. López, Antonio. 2014. Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship. New York: Peter Lang. Louv, Richard. 2010. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-­ Deficit Disorder. London: Atlantic Books. Macfarlane, Robert, and Jackie Morris. 2017. The Lost Words. London: Hamish Hamilton. Macnaghten, Phil, and John Urry. 1998. Contested Natures. London and Thousand Oaks: SAGE. McAllister, Matthew P., and J. Matt Giglio. 2005. ‘The Commodity Flow of US Children’s Television.’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 22 (1): 26–44. McKibben, Bill. 1989. The End of Nature. New York: Penguin Randomhouse. Moore, Ellen Elizabeth. 2016. Green Screen or Smokescreen? Hollywood’s Messages about Nature and the Environment. Environmental Communication 10 (5): 539–555. Oates, Caroline J., Seonaidh McDonald, Mark Blades, and Audrey Laing. 2013. How Green is Children’s Television? Social Business 3 (1): 37–45. Parham, John. 2016. Green Media and Popular Culture. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Payne, Phillip. 2014. Children’s Conceptions of Nature. Australian Journal of Environmental Education 30: 68–75. Pegram, Joni, and Cristina Colon. 2020. Are Climate Change Policies Child-­ Sensitive? New York: United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Pergams, Oliver R.W., and Patricia A. Zaradic. 2006. Is Love of Nature in the US Becoming Love of Electronic Media? 16-year Downtrend in National Park Visits Explained by Watching Movies, Playing Video Games, Internet Use, and Oil Prices. Journal of Environmental Management 80: 387–393.

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Pezzullo, Phaedra C., and Robert Cox. 2018. Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Los Angeles and London: SAGE. Phelan, Liam, and Jacquie Svenson. 2021. Climate Change Will Cost a Young Australian Up to $245,000 Over Their Lifetime, Court Case Reveals. The Conversation, May 27. Accessed June 2, 2021. https://theconversation.com/ climate-­c hange-­w ill-­c ost-­a -­y oung-­a ustralian-­u p-­t o-­2 45-­0 00-­o ver-­t heir-­ lifetime-­court-­case-­reveals-­161175. Phenice, Lillian A., and Robert J. Griffore. 2003. Young Children and the Natural World. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 4 (2): 167–171. Phillipov, Michelle. 2013. In Defense of Textual Analysis: Resisting Methodological Hegemony in Media and Cultural Studies. Critical Studies in Media Communication 30 (3): 209–223. Reuters. 2020. One in Five UK Children Report Nightmares about Climate Change. Thomson Reuters Foundation, March 3. Accessed March 17, 2021. h t t p s : / / w w w. r e u t e r s . c o m / a r t i c l e / c l i m a t e -­c h a n g e -­c h i l d r e n -­ idUSL1N2AV1FF. Rogers, Nicole. 2019. Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change. London: Routledge. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2010. Emile, or, On Education, Ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Ryan, Erin, Jack Wakefield, and Siri Luthen. 2021. Born into the Climate Crisis: Why We Must Act Now to Secure Children’s Rights. London: Save the Children. Samuelsson, Ingrid Pramling, and Yoshie Kaga. 2008. Introduction. In The Contribution of Early Childhood Education to a Sustainable Society, ed. Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Yoshie Kaga, 9–17. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Sigler, Carolyn. 1994. Wonderland to Wasteland: Toward Historicizing Environmental Activism in Children’s Literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 19 (4): 148–153. Soga, Masashi, Kevin J. Gaston, Yuichi Yamaura, Kiyo Kurisu, and Keisuke Hanaki. 2016. Both Direct and Vicarious Experiences of Nature Affect Children’s Willingness to Conserve Biodiversity. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13 (529): 1–12. SPENCER, JANE. 2010. Creating Animal Experience in Late EighteenthCentury Narrative. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (4): 469–486. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2010.00318.x. Starosielski, Nicole. 2011. “Movement that are Drawn”: A History of Environmental Animation from The Lorax to FernGully to Avatar. The International Communication Gazette 73 (1–2): 145–163. Tamaira, A. Mārata, and Ketekiri, with Dionne Fonoti. 2018. Beyond Paradise? Retelling Pacific Stories in Disney’s Moana. The Contemporary Pacific 30 (2): 297–327.

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The Lost Words. 2017. Accessed July 17, 2020. https://www.thelostwords.org/. Thiele, Leslie Paul. 2016. Sustainability. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Ulstein, Gry. 2015. Hobbits, Ents, and Dæmons: ecocritical thought embodied in the fantastic. Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research 2 (4): 7–17. United Nations. 2020. UN Campaign Empowers Kids to Take Climate Action and Protect the Planet. Sustainable Development Goals, November 6. Accessed March 3, 2021. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/ 2020/11/un-­campaign-­empowers-­kids-­to-­take-­climate-­action-­and-­protect-­ the-­planet/. United Nations Environment Programme. 2021. Making Peace with Nature: A Scientific Blueprint to Tackle the Climate, Biodiversity and Pollution Emergencies. Accessed December 12. 2021. https://www.unep.org/resources/making-­ peace-­nature. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. 1996. Advocating Environmentalism: The Voice of Nature in Contemporary Children’s Literature. Children’s Literature in Education 27 (3): 143–152. Walker, Janet, and Nicole Starosielski. 2016. Introduction: Sustainable Media. In Sustainable Media, ed. Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, 1–19. New York and London: Routledge. Weerakkody, Niranjala. 2015. Research Methods for Media and Communication. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. White, Rob, Johanna Wyn, and Brady Robards. 2017. Youth and Society. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Williams, Matt Adam. 2013. Securing Nature’s Future. The Ecologist, April 4. Accessed July 3, 2021. https://theecologist.org/2013/apr/04/securing-­ natures-­future. Williams, Brian, and Mark Riley. 2020. The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History. Environment and History 26 (2): 207–231. Winograd, Ken. 2016. Teaching in Times of Environmental Crises: What on Earth are Elementary Teachers to do? In Education in Times of Environmental Crises: Teaching Children to Be Agents of Change, ed. Ken Winograd, 3–13. London: Routledge. Wyn, Johanna, and Rob White. 1997. Rethinking Youth. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: SAGE. Yusuf, Juita-Elena (Wie), and Burton St. John III (eds). 2021. Communicating Climate Change: Making Environmental Messaging Accessible. London and New York: Routledge. Zipes, Jack. 1995. Breaking the Disney spell. In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 21–42. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Green Time and Screen Time: Mapping the Relationship Between Children, Media, and Nature

The notion of the child’s innate nature-connectedness, discussed in Chap. 1, continues to underpin the way we think and talk about children and the more-than-human world in the early decades of the twenty-first century. However, there is a new sense of urgency propelling these narratives about the child’s place in nature. Increasingly, human populations are living in urban settings (UNICEF 2018). Shifts in how we spend our leisure time, together with longer working hours, mean that families in developed nations are spending less time on nature-based leisure activities like hiking or camping (Williams et  al. 2012; Pergams and Zaradic 2006; Kellert 2002; Planet Ark 2013). Wild spaces are being developed, and new rules and regulations restrict access to natural areas, as do parents who worry about the dangers of outdoor recreation far more than previous generations did (Aaron and Witt 2011; Malone 2007). A sense of child/nature closeness is still idealised by many adult stakeholders, but for childhood as it is lived (rather than imagined) by many young people across the globe there is a growing scarcity of opportunities for nature play, which potentially leads to a lack of care for nature that might be passed from one generation to the next (Soga et  al. 2016). This has prompted some commentators to warn of the “de-naturing” of childhood (Louv 2010: 26; Aaron and Witt 2011: 159) and to call for a rebuilding of the child/ nature connection.

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Media is often implicated in this so-called de-naturing of childhood. Today’s children are consuming more media than ever before, and changing relations between media and everyday life have led to deep and complex transformations of childhood (Marsh and Bishop 2013), to the extent that childhood itself has become “mediatised” (Livingstone 2014: 55). The children and young people of the twenty-first century are often conceptualised as “digital natives”, a term coined in the mid-1990s and popularised by Mark Prensky in a much-cited 2001 article. Prensky writes of a generation gap: today’s young people, he tells us, are the first generation to grow up surrounded by digital technology; they are “‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet” (2001: 1), unlike digital immigrants, who “speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age)” (2001: 2). This way of thinking about young people has been thoroughly challenged, particularly for the assumptions it makes about the uniformity of young people’s digital literacies and access to digital tools (see Jenkins 2007; boyd 2014: 179–180). As danah boyd points out, the term “digital native” is steeped in anxiety: she asks, “Is the goal to celebrate youth savvy or to destroy their practices? Do people intend to recognize native knowledge as valuable or as something that should be restricted and controlled?” (2014: 179). The status of “digital native” is therefore not necessarily a privilege—it is, as boyd implies, an accusation; and it is also a trap, or a constraint, for unlike the “immigrants”, who have arrived in a new digital world and must adapt to it, the children born into this world cannot lay claim to an existence outside of it. In other words, today’s children are imagined to be a generation with origins in an already digitised world; does this mean they are also a generation without an origin in nature? These are my concerns in Chap. 2. Having mapped the child/nature relationship in Chap. 1, I now bring ‘media’ into the equation and consider the various ways media is perceived to facilitate, impede, or complicate the connections between children and the natural world. While the chapters ahead undertake analyses of specific children’s media texts in order to interrogate their representations of the more-than-human world, Chap. 2 considers how the relationship between children, media, and nature has itself been represented in public discourse, and particularly, how it has become an object of both anxiety and fascination for adults. In what follows, I demonstrate that public conversations about the child/ nature relationship often fixate upon media use and reignite century-old debates about the media’s (negative) effect on young audiences. However,

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the ‘media effects’ lens is only one way of perceiving the child/media/ nature nexus: I propose that we can reframe this relationship by considering how media literacies—the competencies and skills required for participation in the digital age—intersect with environmental literacies. In mapping these theoretical frameworks, this chapter will provide context for the analyses in the chapters ahead.

The Nature Deficit Disorder and the “De-naturing” of Childhood The call to reconnect children with nature comes through powerfully in the work of journalist and social commentator Richard Louv, whose 2005 book Last Child in the Woods introduces the term “nature deficit disorder” to express the author’s concern that the current generation of children is no longer fully receiving nature’s “gifts” (2010: 10). For Louv, “nature deficit disorder” is best understood as a “generational break from nature” (2010: 33) that has manifested due to certain features of modern life including the criminalisation of nature play, growing parental fears about the dangers of outdoor activity, time pressures on parents, media consumption, and the physical structure of cities. These forces, he argues, have eroded the connection to nature that previous generations of children enjoyed. While Louv stresses in his book that “nature deficit disorder” is not an official medical diagnosis, the term (with its resemblance to “attention deficit disorder”) certainly works to frame the child/nature disconnection as a health problem. The medical metaphors activated in Louv’s text also position the loss of child/nature-connectedness as a symptom or indicator of an unwell society—a metonymic sign of the human disconnection from nature more generally and of the social and environmental problems that have arisen as a consequence. Like Louv’s subsequent writings on the human/nature relationship, Last Child in the Woods was hugely influential. Not only did it see the emergence of “nature deficit disorder” as a cultural construct, but it led directly to policy change in the US, informing the development of specific policies aiming to reforge the child/nature connection (Sheldrake et al. 2019: 8), including the 2015 “No Child Left Inside Act” which supported the development and implementation of state-based environmental literacy programmes. Louv’s work also resonated globally, even though much of his writing in Last Child in the Woods is US-specific. In the UK,

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the notion of a nature deficit disorder is addressed by nature writer Stephen Moss in a report for the National Trust which makes recommendations for action including the organisation of outdoor events and the campaigning for children’s outdoor play areas and safe access routes (2012). In Australia, not-for-profit environmental organisation Planet Ark’s 2013 report on this topic is subtitled “The Inside Story of an Outdoor Nation”, suggesting that there is a cultural identity at stake here too—young people’s disconnection from the outdoor world is here represented as a threat to Australianness itself, which in turn is built upon myths of “[b]ackyards, barbecues, beaches and the bush” (Planet Ark 2013: 4). The years following the publication of Louv’s book also saw the emergence of numerous organisations, programmes, and initiatives seeking to reconnect children with the outdoor world. These include the Child and Nature Network which Louv himself co-founded; Green Hour, a programme developed by the National Wildlife Federation in the US; and Nature Play Australia, which describes itself as “an alliance of not-for-­ profit associations established to increase the time Australian children spend in unstructured play outdoors and in nature”, on a mission to “work innovatively and collaboratively to make nature play a normal part of childhood again” (n.d., my emphasis). The suggestion here is that experiences of the past must be recaptured in order to heal the current generation, who are suffering in ways their parents did not and have deviated from desirable or ‘normal’ definitions of childhood. This aligns with Louv’s arguments that nature is one of the “vital ingredients” of childhood (2010: 117) but also that the child/nature relationship is no longer a biological or existential certainty: it is a problem to be fixed. Similarly, the Green Hour website—which is replete with images of healthy, happy, outdoor children with dirty hands and sensible clothes—addresses parents with these words: Hey Parents! Many of your favorite childhood memories may involve playing and exploring outside: climbing trees, riding bikes, playing tag, swimming, building sandcastles, constructing forts, exploring the world around you and imagining your way into new worlds. But did you know that time spent outdoors in nature for American kids has decreased by more than 50%, on average? Meanwhile, time spent inside and plugged into electronic media has stretched to more than six hours per day. Today’s children are the first generation to grow up somewhat disconnected from nature. (‘Hey Parents!’, n.d.)

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In addition to the direct references to the culpability of electronic media (which will be discussed momentarily), there is a resounding sense of generational loss expressed in this statement, with parents invited to access their own memories of being-in-nature before being hit with the alarming notion that such experiences are no longer the norm for American children. As this quote suggests, parents and other adult figures are frequently identified by such organisations as intermediaries, gatekeepers, and guides—there is a clear narrative of children who have lost their way being guided back to nature by adult authorities and institutions. Informed by Louv’s text, such organisations are also health-focused—the goal is to achieve healthy childhood, and this largely eclipses any messages about environmental sustainability or, indeed, environmental justice. Extensive debate about the nature deficit disorder has unfolded both within and outside academia in the years since Last Child in the Woods was published. The ‘disorder’ has been described as a “buzzword” (Briggs 2016) and blamed for “fuelling uncertainty” over a changing media landscape (Tudge and Krotoski 2012). Naomi Schalit (2006) is critical of the way Louv “virtually condemns the nature-deprived among us to lives of physical and mental deformation”; she also rejects the “utilitarian” ideologies that frame any understanding of nature “as a prescription medicine”. Other commentators have pointed out that public discussion about the nature deficit disorder tends to paradoxically lament the separation of humans from nature while discursively constructing and enforcing just such a separation (Fletcher 2017a; csandbrook 2016). Stephen Moss (2012) is somewhat critical of the concept even while deploying it in his report for the UK’s National Trust: while recognising the need to reconnect children with nature, Moss is quick to point out that he does not advocate a return to a “mythical golden age” by shrugging off the trappings of a modern, technologically-enhanced life. Indeed, in these criticisms the need for children to spend more time in nature is often not disputed—instead, the fraught issue here relates to how the child/nature relationship is politicised, problematised, and pathologised. What we can detect in the nature deficit disorder framework, then, are twin assumptions: firstly, that children are born with an inherent connection to nature that, today, is eroded by their experiences in modern life and by decisions made by adult stakeholders (including parents); and secondly, that past generations enjoyed a healthier, more authentic childhood because they were ‘closer’ to nature than today’s children. In Louv’s writing, these assumptions are propelled by the author’s comparison of his

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own childhood, in which he wandered freely in woods and fields, to the (imagined) childhood of today in which children stay indoors, families do not mingle outside, and the wild spaces around urban and suburban neighbourhoods have disappeared. A deep sense of elegy and nostalgia drives his argument, and he privileges an adult’s perspective on the child/ nature relationship: he interweaves his own recollections of childhood with the memories and reflections of adult interviewees, in order to show that the child/nature relationship of a specific time and place—1950s America—is no longer the norm. As Dickinson (2013) and Malone (2016) have pointed out, it is problematic to commence any discussions about the child’s place in nature with an assumption that the child/nature relationship was idyllic in the past: “the assumption that past generations were closer to nature”, Dickinson writes, “can deemphasize a long history of environmental degradation and disconnectedness” (2013: 321), while Malone critiques Louv’s “narrow romanticized focus and uncritical view of what returning to a past reincarnation of the child-nature relationship actually means” (2016: 6). We might recall here Peter Kahn’s argument that “generational amnesia” impedes the current generation’s ability to understand the magnitude of environmental problems (2002): from this perspective, it is impossible to recapture human/nature relationships of the past, and more productive to equip young people to deal with environmental problems of the present and future. We might also recall Bill McKibben’s notion of the “end of nature” (1989), which troubles any conceptualisation of the natural world as, to borrow Schalit’s phrase, “prescription medicine” (2006). Indeed, when there are plastics in the deepest parts of the ocean and anthropogenic climate change has turned parts of nature into a threat to human existence, it is problematic to think of nature as a pure, pristine ‘place’ that children can simply go to (or get lost in). It is telling, therefore, that McKibben—writing nearly a decade before Louv—describes climate change as “the first environmental problem we can’t escape by moving to the woods” (1989: 918). He encapsulates here the notion that getting (our children) back into nature will not help us solve the anthropogenic problems that shadow and distort the human/ nature relationship today. It is for this reason that Dickinson, in her sustained critique of the concept, argues that the nature deficit disorder is underpinned by cultural assumptions that “can obscure core issues and inadvertently promote messages of weak sustainability” (2013: 316), simplifying the problems that have led to “human-nature estrangement”

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(2013: 318) by proposing the return of the child to nature as an all-­ encompassing solution.

“There’s No App for This”: Green Time Versus Screen Time Media is often called out as a culprit in nature deficit disorder narratives. This is unsurprising: screen-based media practices such as television viewing have long been seen to replace ‘healthy’ activities like sport, outdoor play, and social interaction (Cox et al. 2013: 108; Pergams and Zaradic 2006: 391). It is often argued that media use leads to sedentary, indoor lifestyles and decreased time spent in nature (Pergams and Zaradic 2006: 391), and the rise of media technology is frequently identified as one of many factors that are distancing children from the natural world (Payne 2014: 75; Elliott 2015: 42). Seen from this perspective, media technologies and devices are unwanted intruders into childhood and disruptors of the child/nature relationship. ‘Nature’ and ‘the screen’ are seen to compete for young people’s time in an increasingly time-poor society, and electronic media is blamed for drawing children away from outdoor activity. Last Child in the Woods aligns with such a media-blaming stance. Louv contends that children’s relationship with nature today is one of “electronic detachment” (2010: 16) and that play itself has become “televised” (2010: 10). While media is certainly not the only contributing factor he identifies in his delineation of the nature deficit disorder—as noted above, he also writes about parental fears that the outside world is unsafe for children and the criminalisation of outdoor play—it is an important one, particularly because of the binaries he constructs around it. “Unlike television”, Louv writes, “nature does not steal time; it amplifies it” (2010: 7); television, he proposes, is “the most effective thief of time”, stealing away opportunities for creative play in nature and leading to “time poverty”, multitasking, and a fragmentation of attention (2010: 119). The child’s time and attention are here commodified, with recommendations that they be ‘spent’ in more productive ways. Throughout the book, these two fundamental parts of modern childhood—screen time and green time—appear to be locked in a dance of distance: screen media diminishes and nature replenishes; screen media damages and nature heals; screen media numbs the brain and nature inspires; screen media is associated with

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deprivation and nature with abundance. Unlike screen media which demands engagement through viewing alone, nature “inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses” (2010: 7)—here, Louv proffers the example of a child skiing down a mountain in Colorado with headphones on, unwilling to listen to the sounds of nature: It was a perfect, quiet day, the kids are skiing down the mountain—and they’ve got their headphones on. They can’t enjoy just hearing nature and being out there alone. They can’t make their own entertainment. They have to bring something with them. (interviewee, quoted in Louv 2010: 12)

Supplied by a parent interviewee, this example both problematises and pathologises childhood (and the child’s tendency to seek pleasure from media, technology, and popular culture). Media devices are framed here as problems that children ‘bring’ with them into otherwise ‘pure’ nature experiences, while children themselves are seen as deficient, incapable of enjoying the more-than-human world without technological enhancement or overlays. Nature, meanwhile, is depicted here as a pleasure to be consumed, one that is valued more highly than the pleasures offered by media. What we find in Last Child in the Woods, then, is an imagined opposition between ‘green time’ and ‘screen time’, and an expression of an adult desire to recover childhood from the clutches of the digital, electronic world. Other representations of the nature deficit disorder are steeped in such ideas. The home page of the Child and Nature Network, for example, is adorned with images of children immersed in nature, wandering down forest paths or gazing at the stars. These images are accompanied by captions that directly address the opposition between nature and electronic media, such as “there’s no app for this”, “more green, less screen”, and “kids won’t remember their best day of YouTube” (n.d.). Similarly, Nature Play Australia offers a ‘Nature Passport Outdoor App’ which aims to “help families and schools replace kids’ sedentary screen-time with playing, exploring and learning outdoors” (n.d.)—with little acknowledgement of the irony that an app itself constitutes a type of ‘screen time’. Nature Play Australia also offers a downloadable resource entitled “Green Time vs Screen Time”, containing a printable image of a tree with seven wild animals in and under its branches along with seven television screens. Families are instructed to colour in one of the animals for every hour spent outdoors in nature and to do likewise with the screens for every hour indoors on a media device. The aim is to colour in all the animals before

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the screens—if the goal is achieved, the family wins a prize or treat they have devised for themselves. This provides us with a clear example of how the act of reconnecting children with nature is often framed as a moral struggle, a tug-of-war between green time and screen time where one side is the worthy winner. What we are seeing in the above examples is a signification process whereby media—especially screen media, and in particular television and the mobile phone—come to stand metonymically for complex problems at the heart of the human/nature relationship. In this way, media devices and ‘the screen’ are co-opted as signs of the nature deficit disorder. To fully understand how media is woven into these signification practices, and why, we need to critically engage with the effects tradition of media research and acknowledge its influence on public discourse about children’s media engagement today. The effects tradition investigates media’s influence on the behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes of audiences (Potter 2012; O’Neill 2011), and has provided an important lens for examining the relationship between children and media throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some of the earliest studies of media (e.g., the Payne Fund studies of the 1920s) were specifically driven by a concern about the negative effect of media consumption on children as a vulnerable audience (McQuail 1997: 17). The nature deficit disorder can be read as an iteration of the media effects model because it identifies media consumption as a type of exposure to a corrupting, unhealthy, or harmful influence. At play here, too, is what O’Connor has called the “myth of toxic childhood” (2013). Drawing on Barthes’ understanding of myth, O’Connor proposes that childhood in contemporary Western societies is understood to have “deteriorated” and become “toxic”, largely due to the effects of “screen-based culture” (2013: 138). This mythic image of toxic childhood is set against the ideal childhood, epitomised by the child at peace in the natural world. O’Connor notes, The belief that childhood should be a time of goodness, recreation, and communing with nature is part of the cult of childhood innocence that is as much a myth as that of toxic childhood. (2013: 138)

The “cult” or “myth” of childhood innocence that O’Connor identifies here is a centuries-old understanding that can be traced at least as far back as the philosopher John Locke, who perceived the child as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which adult wisdom could be imprinted (Jenkins 1998).

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As James Kincaid has argued, this myth of childhood innocence leads to an understanding of the child as being “without a lot of things… dispossessed and eviscerated, without much substance” (1998: 53), an empty vessel to be filled with ideas by the adults around it. This empty child is often evoked in debates about the negative effect of the media on young audiences. Concerns about media effects are often articulations of deeper cultural anxieties (Buckingham and Strandgaard Jensen 2012; Turnbull 2020: 34). In the case of the nature deficit disorder, anxieties about the changing face of childhood, along with separate anxieties about the changing human relationship with nature, have been projected onto children and their interactions with both media and the natural world. It is appropriate to evoke here some of the criticisms of the media effects tradition put forward by cultural theorists who argue that it “tackles social problems backwards” (Gauntlett 2005: 144) and underestimates the degree to which audiences—including very young audiences—actively decode media meanings (Turnbull 2020: 63; Livingstone 1996: 305; Gauntlett 2005: 150). For Henry Jenkins, the media effects model is a problem because it dismisses “the degree of control people have over the media, [and] the ways in which we assert that authority on a routine basis” (Jenkins et al. 2016: 106). Writing about “the war between ‘effects’ and meanings’”, Jenkins proclaims: Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement; they can be articulated into words; and they can be critically examined. (2006a: 2010)

Seen from this perspective, media is not just a force that diminishes children’s nature time, but a space within which children encounter and negotiate the meanings of nature. In this book, I am concerned with meanings rather than effects: that is, with the representations of the more-­ than-­human world that we find within the space of children’s media, rather than with arguments about the benefits or detriments of media use for young people. Similarly, it is not my intention in this book to assess whether the nature deficit disorder is real. I am more interested here in the disorder as a cultural construct, and in the image of childhood that it has propelled throughout the cultural imagination.

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“A New Sense of Wonder”? Real and Virtual Nature Claims that children are suffering a nature deficit disorder are troubled by what is an increasingly blurred boundary between real and virtual experiences in or with nature. With the rise of mobile devices and interactive technologies, media consumption has diversified in a way that is not necessarily reflected in assertions that media ‘steals’ children’s ‘green time’. With this diversification in mind, Büscher (2016: 2) uses the term “nature 2.0” to refer to “new online forms and manifestations” of the human production of nature and to explore new media’s shaping of environmental practices and politics. Büscher points out that nature conservation organisations have adapted to the affordances and challenges of the digital age, and identifies the importance of digital and interactive media in building support for causes relating to sustainability and conservation. Building on Büscher’s work, Fletcher (2017b) argues that digital games can promote conservation. Fletcher identifies a paradox: screen-based media can be used to combat the very problems that, elsewhere, are attributed to screen-based media. For example, videogames might be identified as part of the problem (because they draw children away from the outdoors) but also part of the solution (because they can teach children about the natural world). Interactive and mobile media, therefore, lead to intersections rather than divisions between real and virtual, embodied and digital, online and offline experiences. The practice of consuming children’s media, moreover, is an emplaced practice. To imagine a division between ‘screen time’ and ‘green time’ is to assume that mediated communication occurs in a place-less realm, and/ or that it cannot occur in natural places. In actuality, media can be consumed in nature (for instance, listening to a podcast while walking in a park or forest) and it can also be produced in nature (for instance, using a mobile phone to take and share photos of wild places). Many conservation organisations rely upon the media practices of ‘citizen scientists’, including young people, who can assist with the tracking of animal populations in local areas by taking and sharing photos or participating in online monitoring programmes. Meanwhile, mobile games and tools like virtual or augmented reality can be used in creative ways by media producers to encourage young audiences to take their media consumption outside (Hawley 2018). As noted above, even Nature Play Australia uses an app as part of its communication strategy, and there is an interesting friction here between the depiction of screen time as a problem and the use of a

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screen-­based tool as a solution. Louv’s skiing child, moreover, who enjoys an outdoor experience with headphones on, is both an object of adult anxiety in the twenty-first century and an example of a media consumer who is located outdoors in a wild natural (and active) setting. If the term ‘screen time’ excludes audio or sonic media experiences such as listening to music, this too is problematic as the boundary between various media products, formats, and industries becomes harder to detect in a media environment defined by convergence and the circulation of content across media boundaries (Jenkins 2006b). Children’s play itself can break down these boundaries, too. Chawla argues that ‘nature’ is where children construct the landscape of childhood—she proposes that children overwrite the natural landscapes in which they play with their own stories (2002: 218–219). However, these stories may incorporate elements of media culture, so that a creek or a wood or a weedy backyard transforms into a scene from a favourite movie or videogame. Children’s outdoor games might also incorporate media devices or popular culture objects. The children’s media franchise Pokémon provides us with an interesting example of these intersections between real and virtual texts, worlds, and experiences. At one point the highest performing franchise in the world, and a notable example of transmedia storytelling consisting of multiple games, films, television programmes, playing cards, and ancillary products, Pokémon is held up by some researchers (Louv 2010: 33; Ballouard et al. 2011) as an example of a children’s media franchise that has nothing to do with environmentalism or nature and that directs children’s attention away from ‘real’ concerns like nature conservation. Ballouard and co-­ authors (2011) contrast the vast knowledge children accumulate, memorise, and display about the creatures that inhabit media worlds such as Pokémon with their limited knowledge of real biodiversity. Seen in this way, Pokémon fandom is incompatible with environmentalism. Jason Bainbridge, however, offers another way of looking at this complex franchise. “For close to 20 years”, he argues, “Pokémon intertexts have produced transmedia storytelling that informs and reflects upon larger issues of environmentalism, biodiversity and materialism” (2014: 400). Indeed, with its vast collection of creatures who must be understood as well as collected, Pokémon’s very brand identity as a franchise rests upon the incredible biodiversity of an imaginary world—it invites audiences to focus on the differences between species and the value inherent in these differences. For Bainbridge, the fantastic elements of the Pokémon franchise do not distance or distract young audiences from real environmental

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issues—quite the opposite: “the abstracted strangeness of the pokémon… reminds us of our relationship to real organisms” and “encourages reflection on the ways in which we represent, engage and contain nature” (2014: 408–409). Bainbridge draws here from Hertz (1999), who argues that the Pokémon environment is no more a simulation of nature than zoos or wildlife parks. In a 2002 article for Science magazine, meanwhile, Balmford and co-authors argue that Pokémon’s popularity is an indication of children’s “innate interest” in biodiversity, their instinct towards biophilia, and their ability to accumulate large volumes of knowledge about “creatures” (2367). Rather than identifying Pokémon as part of the problem, these authors argue that conservationists should be inspired by Pokémon’s creators and strive to better engage children in learning about the ‘real’ natural world. If we consider that the act of watching or playing Pokémon can be likened to the act of walking through a zoo or visiting a wildlife park, we can start to see that experiences with nature sit on a continuum or spectrum rather than being neatly divisible into categories such as ‘real’ or ‘virtual’. This is not to suggest a division between ‘new’ and ‘legacy’ media. As the chapters ahead will demonstrate, any investigation of environmental communication for children must acknowledge the convergence of old and new media forms, particularly by considering the way children’s films and television programmes exist as part of interconnected textual webs and, often, vast transmedia stories. Moreover, the screening of nature itself (through legacy and/or new media) is a practice that throws the nature deficit disorder construct into disarray. Even as populations become removed from nature through urbanisation, media technology can offer us virtual experiences with nature that are more compelling, realistic, moving, and awe-inspiring than ever before (Mitman 2009; Brereton 2005), from wildlife documentaries that enable us to view a snow leopard in the Himalayan alps or the mating ritual of birds deep in the Amazon rainforest to virtual reality experiences that take us into the ocean depths or allow us to view the Earth from space. In a media moment driven and defined by on-demand culture, audiences of all ages have access to an abundance of environmental content and to endless images of nature-on-­ screen. There are entire television networks devoted to nature documentaries (such as the multinational Discovery Channel). Subscription-video-on-demand provider Netflix offers nature-based content under the thematic labels ‘Nature and Ecology Documentaries’, ‘Science and Nature TV’, and the children-specific ‘All Things Wild’,

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while its competitor Disney Plus provides countless similar titles in its ‘vault’ under the Disneynature and National Geographic banners. A viewer who subscribes to these two streaming services alone (not to mention others such as Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, or Hulu) can access screened nature for hours in their homes or outside them, on television screens or mobile devices, with environmental content packaged and offered up to the binge-watcher alongside the other riches of on-demand culture. Endless online lists suggest the environmental documentaries we should “binge watch now” (see, e.g., Global Wildlife Conservation 2020), contributing to this sense of content abundance and signalling that the primary purpose of environmental media is to entertain. Interestingly, nature-based content is often framed as an alternative to other, supposedly less healthy forms of screen time for children, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which many children across the world experienced extended time indoors due to lockdown policies. Nature documentaries, for example, are seen to have educational and relaxing aspects, as well as an ability to transport viewers to an otherwise inaccessible world (or grant viewers ‘access’ to wild nature) that sets them apart from other types of media content or other media experiences (see Natale 2020). Announcing the decision to “unlock” some of Netflix’s nature documentaries and provide them free via YouTube during the pandemic—particularly as an aid to students and teachers during remote learning periods—the website Open Culture stated, “[m]any of us kept indoors by the COVID-19 pandemic for days—or rather weeks, or perhaps months—have been imbued with a new sense of wonder about our world” (2020). Similarly, film critic Scott Tobias wrote in the New York Times during the pandemic’s initial stages, Children under quarantine are enjoying an excess of ‘screen time,’ if only to give their overtaxed parents a break. But there’s no reason they can’t learn a few things in the process. These nature documentaries have educational value for the whole family, while also offering a chance to experience the great outdoors from inside your living room. (2020)

As this suggests, the pandemic both amplified and complicated the nature deficit disorder narrative. Remote instruction during the pandemic made it more difficult to ‘blame’ the media for reducing children’s nature time, even while the human craving for nature-connectedness increased during periods of lockdown (Shaffer 2020). Meanwhile, the wildlife

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documentary—a genre which is becoming more environmentally aware in the twenty-first century (Richards 2013; Jones et al. 2019)—has found a new home on streaming platforms and is flourishing in this transformed television industry, while children are positioned as audiences for such mediatised depictions of the more-than-human world. The COVID-19 pandemic also saw an increase in the human reliance on media technologies for contact with wild nature. For example, live ‘nature cam’ networks, such as those provided by the multimedia organisation Explore, were used by families as resources during extended periods of lockdown when freedom to travel was restricted and nature could not be accessed by all (Jarratt 2021). This proliferation and normalisation of screened nature—and of the child as viewer of nature—is important, showing that the analyses in this book trigger, and are part of, broader and evolving cultural debates about the media/nature relationship as it impinges on or facilitates childhood.

Misinformation and the Commercialisation of Childhood Concerns about media’s effect on the child/nature relationship are not limited to the nature deficit disorder. Media is also considered part of the ‘problem’ because it can expose children to harmful ideologies, providing the spaces and platforms where problematic ideas about the environment(al crisis) are promulgated: through media, for example, visions of a non-­ sustainable way of life are normalised and reinforced, stories about the human domination of nature are repeatedly told, and children encounter, learn, and internalise damaging anthropocentric ideologies that see nature as a resource to be tapped or dominated, or that reinforce divisions between human and non-human natures (López 2014: 72; Share 2020: 283). This way of thinking has its roots in cultivation theory, a framework developed in the 1960s to examine the long-term effects of media, particularly the accumulation of certain feelings, attitudes, and worldviews in heavy consumers of media (Gerbner 1998). For Shanahan and co-authors, the relevance of cultivation theory for studies of environmental communication lies in its focus on “patterns of images and representations” to which audiences are exposed over a long period of time, rather than on “the impact of any particular program, genre, or episode” (1997: 309). From this perspective, children’s media may gradually encourage young

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audiences into ways of thinking that are harmful to the natural world, particularly the belief, in George Lakoff’s words, that “greed is good and that the natural world is a resource for short-term private enrichment” (2010: 77). Arguably, too, children’s media trains young audiences in the practices of spectatorship and consumption that support the commercial imperatives of the media industries. Children’s media positions young audiences within markets (Marsh 2010: 25), easing them into consumer practices and ideologies, and children’s popular culture is associated with “over-­ marketization” and product tie-ins with excessive plastic packaging (Edwards et al. 2016: 33–34), and is therefore seen to be ‘unnatural’ for many reasons. Golin and Campbell, writing for the American environmental research organisation Worldwatch, argue that childhood has been “transformed by the media and marketing industries” with marketers “creating a commercialized childhood that is unhealthy, unsustainable, and leaves kids woefully unprepared for a future that will require new kinds of behaviors, skills, and values” (2017: 156–157). Understood in this way, media consumption itself is embedded in a value system that is at odds with environmental sustainability. Meanwhile, representations of nature produced by profit-making media companies are often designed to entertain rather than inform, and this too has a potential effect, not necessarily on child audiences but on the representation of the environment within such texts. As Jyotsna Kapur points out, children’s movies, for example, often fall into the category of “high-concept” films, which are “designed to maximise returns by eliminating ambiguity in favour of easy recognizability… and simple narrative… that can be translated across a wide range of commodities” (2005: 148). Arguably, this leads to the simplifying, trivialising, or even obscuring of environmental problems, and the construction of child audiences whose connection to the more-than-­ human world is superficial, lacking in complexity. In the chapters ahead, I will address this concern in more detail. Notably, some of the representative case studies chosen for analysis in this book—such as the children’s news programmes examined in Chap. 3, and the animated films analysed in Chap. 6—demonstrate that while industry imperatives certainly do inform the production of ‘the environment’ as subject material for young audiences, simplification is not always the outcome. Framing, too—the packaging of events or issues for interpretation—is a type of effect that media can have on young audiences in relation to the environment. Variations in how information is presented to audiences as

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well as in what is communicated can influence the way we understand, respond to, and develop knowledge about an issue or event, particularly when certain aspects of issues are elevated in salience (Cacciatore et  al. 2016; Entman 1993). A wealth of research has shown that media often frames the environment in a way that ‘others’ nature, renders environmental problems invisible, or emphasises individual action rather than policy change (Trumbo 1996; Nisbet 2010; Anderson 2014; Lakoff 2010). Again, a fuller discussion of such framing will be undertaken in the chapters ahead. For now, let us consider a simple example: the representation of endangered animal species in children’s nature media, such as wildlife magazines or documentaries. If such media texts fail to represent a high level of biodiversity, children may develop a limited understanding of which of the world’s species are worthy of protection. It has been argued that, in nature media, such ‘worthiness’ extends to a few iconic or “flagship” mammal species such as polar bears, big cats, and whales (Ballouard et al. 2011; Born 2019). Ballouard and co-authors (2011) found that, as a result of this media attention paid to specific, “attractive” animals, children were only able to identify a very small percentage of the world’s threatened species. They also found that children’s ability to identify polar bears, whales, and big cats as endangered was consistent across cultural and national boundaries, which led the researchers to conclude that media consumption was an influence, directing children’s attention away from the biodiversity and environmental problems in their local areas. Tellingly, they described this as “the potential negative effects of the media focusing too narrowly on a very few species” (Ballouard et al. 2011). Media is also considered ‘part of the problem’ because it exposes children—and, indeed, adults—to misinformation, making it harder for young audiences to understand or converse with others about the environmental crisis. Research for UNICEF has pointed out that misinformation “is very much a part of children’s lives” due to their position “as active digital users” (Howard et al. 2021: 4). In turn, misinformation about environmental problems like climate change, from social media posts by climate deniers to greenwashing campaigns by fossil fuel companies, has been described as “a kind of climate pollution that we can’t see clearly” (Posters 2021), poisoning the information ‘landscape’ or ‘ecosystem’ just as humans continue to pollute the Earth. This can lead to a reduction in acceptance of climate change science and a polarisation of public views on climate change. We might describe this as a battle of effects, whereby media-makers who seek to inform audiences about climate change and to

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instigate positive change in relation to the environment find their messages weakened by misinformation (Cook 2019; Bloomfield and Tillery 2019). For children, misinformation makes it harder to learn about environmental problems, both directly (when they encounter misinformation in the media themselves) and indirectly (when they encounter it through parents or other trusted sources). This, too, is a very real problem—an urgent problem—but responses to this problem and, particularly, construction of it in the public sphere evoke equally problematic assumptions about the innocence and vulnerability of the child audience. So too, concerns about the media’s ideological influence on young people often lead to an interpretation of children as insufficient or incompetent media users who must be protected and guarded by adult experts and authority figures—but they are also very real, valid concerns, and we will discover in the chapters ahead that the commercial imperatives and framing patterns of the children’s media industries do imprint in a very real and manifest way upon the environmental media texts and products that young people encounter today. In this way, the prickly problem of media effects marches doggedly alongside this book’s investigation of the children/media/nature relationship and, quite simply, refuses to go home. To add another layer of complication, positive effects deserve consideration here too. Compared with studies of the damaging effects of media, there is less research into positive or prosocial effects (Gauntlett 2005: 55), which means that the effects model has tended to view the media/audience relationship in terms of exposure, risk, and harm, but this does not mean that media cannot have beneficial effects on audiences or society. Social learning theory (Bandura and Walters 1977) tells us that children might imitate the problematic behaviour (such as violence) they encounter in the media—but does this mean that children will also adopt pro-environmental behaviour if presented with characters who enact such behaviour on screen? The very possibility of positive media effects has informed calls for the ‘greening’ of media content for all ages: for example, the BBC’s recent proposal to incorporate environmental themes more thoroughly into television drama (Foster and Lukov 2019), or the recent “greening” of nature documentaries (Richards 2013). Environmental media is created by journalists, filmmakers, writers, and activists because of a firm belief that it will have an ‘effect’—it is also made because of an equally firm belief that the films, television shows, news stories, and social media content that deny climate

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change or endorse damaging ideological viewpoints have an ‘effect’ that needs to be countered. In this chapter, I have outlined the various ways that the relationship between children, media, and nature is perceived and discussed in the public sphere. I have identified a growing cultural anxiety over the mediatisation of childhood and the perceived relocation of childhood into virtual spaces, along with a persistent belief that electronic media leads to a replacing of green time with screen time. Reading these concerns as an iteration of the media effects model, I have attempted to problematise these ways of thinking because they need to be problematised: children today are growing up in a world where the relationship between nature and electronic media is too complex and multifaceted to be contained within a media effects framework. This is not a dismissal of media effects or their applicability to studies of the relationship between children and nature. This book does not seek to solve the media effects ‘problem’. It acknowledges that (some) effects of the media on children are real, but it resists the pull of the effects tradition as a too-easy way of encapsulating media’s role in the child/nature relationship, especially in the context of a participatory and networked media culture. Indeed, as media culture becomes more participatory, the balance of power shifts so that citizens, as well as professional media-makers, are responsible for the effects of media on society and culture, including the circulation of pro-environmental messages. As Mimi Ito puts it, “we need to be moving away from the frame of what ‘they the media’ are doing to us to what ‘we the media’ are responsible for” (Jenkins et al. 2016: 104). This is particularly relevant at a time when children are turning to platforms like YouTube for their media consumption and are therefore encountering amateur and citizen media made by adults and other children alongside content made and distributed by media companies. In this way, the relationship between children, environment, and media is best described as a complex web of interactions, rather than a linear transmission of ideas or effects.

Media and Environmental Literacies My intention in this book is not to demonstrate that media is not a problem or an impediment to a harmonious child/nature relationship: it is to explore the various ways in which media can be more than a problem. With

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this in mind, let me conclude this chapter by addressing one final, and very important, aspect of the child/media/nature nexus: the intersection between media and environmental literacies. As I have shown, concerns about media’s negative effect on nature-connectedness lead to calls for children (and childhood) to be disentangled or unplugged from media texts, devices, and practices. A reduction in screen time may alleviate the nature deficit disorder, creating more time for children to spend in nature, while disengaging from media altogether may seem the easiest way for children to escape the ideological trappings of consumer culture and the spectre of misinformation. However, shielding children from media robs them of the opportunity to develop much-needed media literacies: the skills and cultural competencies that allow individuals to read, access, analyse, evaluate, share, and create media content, and to understand and participate in media processes. Itself often hailed as a solution to the problem of media’s negative influence, media literacy has been described by Renee Hobbs as being centred around “the pedagogy of inquiry—the act of asking questions about media texts”, which cultivates “an open, questioning, reflective, critical stance towards symbolic texts of all kinds” (1998: 27) and “emphasizes a critique of textual authority” (1998: 22). Similarly, McDougall describes media literacy as: an active process of deconstruction. In some ways it is an attitude, or a state of mind, rather than a learned skill or set of competences. It is a temporal function, in the sense that it demands we ‘stop’ the rapid process of signification for long enough to think about the constructed nature of the meanings at stake. (2006: 114)

Whether we consider media literacy to be a skill, a set of competencies, or—like McDougall—a “state of mind”, we can identify it as a vital component of the relationship between children, media, and nature. In particular, learning to critique media messages is an important step in empowering children as environmental thinkers and future decision-­ makers. As Pat Brereton puts it, It is not enough to be educated about the environment… we also need to understand how people communicate (textually and audio-visually) about the environment and how our feelings about the natural world are ripe for exploitation. (2018: 37)

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For example, knowledge about the journalistic concept of ‘newsworthiness’ might help young people understand that when an issue like environmental injustice is not depicted in the news as frequently or spectacularly as another like terrorism or violent crime, this does not mean it is not devastatingly important or that the damage it causes is not worthy of attention. Media literacy can counter or diminish the effects of framing: it shines a light on patterns of representation, making visible the semiotic “work” (Hansen 2019: 2; Hansen and Machin 2013: 156) that allows a polar bear (for instance) to take on iconic status in environmental communication even though there are millions of lesser-known species impacted by climate change. In other words, media literacy is important because it encourages questioning and unpacking of the narratives that inform the way humans treat the natural world. Stibbe refers to these narratives as “the stories we live by” (2015: 2), and while he takes an ecolinguistics approach—examining “ideologies, metaphors, frames and a variety of other cognitive and linguistic phenomena” with the goal of “revealing and uncovering the stories that shape people’s lives and shape the society in which we live” (2015: 5)—we can view media literacy in the same way. Indeed, Share argues that critical media literacy “promotes social and environmental justice through critiquing dominant ideologies” (2020: 284), whether this occurs through the analysis or the production of media messages. Media literacy is also considered to be an effective means of combatting misinformation (Naderer and Opree 2021; Hobbs 2017). UNESCO has proclaimed that citizens who lack media literacy competencies “are prone to climate-related disinformation and unverified claims disseminated through various forms of online and offline media” (2021). A set of educational resources was produced by the organisation to improve media literacy in the face of misinformation, including an infographic inviting parents to “teach your child how to spot false content and rumours” through practices of fact-checking, investigating sources, and critical thinking (UNESCO 2021). As depicted here, media literacy can empower young audiences to make better choices about the environment-related information they seek out and to better understand, work with, and share the information they consume; it is also depicted as a set of competencies that can be passed between generations, albeit in a manner that privileges the parent’s authoritative role. Understood in this way, though, media literacy does not allow us to fully escape the media effects paradigm, and in many of the arguments above, we see the problematic aspects of the effects tradition writ large. As

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with the nature deficit disorder, a troublesome medical metaphor can be detected here: misinformation and its spread through culture are seen as a contagion, something that is “socially infectious”, while it is claimed that audiences can be “inoculated” through a strengthening of the mental immune system against false or damaging messages (Van Der Linden et al. 2017: 2). We can locate such thinking within what Hobbs has critically labelled the “protectionist stance”, whereby media exposure is seen as a risk factor and media literacy a protective factor (1998: 19). Moreover, media literacy can sometimes be entangled with assumptions that people (especially young people) have a knowledge deficit that “needs to be filled through the one-way transmission of information from experts to learners” (Cooper 2011: 231). When applied to children, both the protectionist stance and the knowledge deficit position construct an image of the child audience as incapable, vulnerable, and without any defining features. Here again is the myth of childhood innocence, the child as a blank slate to be filled with either harmful or helpful information through, or about, media consumption. Both ways of thinking rely on transmission models of communication that do not match the complexity of today’s media landscape and were formulated long before developments in cultural theory pushed for greater recognition of audience agency. Just as boyd problematises the way “narrow versions of media literacy and critical thinking are being proposed as the solution to major socio-cultural issues” (2018), we should be cautious about labelling media literacy the ‘silver bullet’ solution to the problems relating to truth, trust, misinformation, and representation that hamper environmental messaging today. Focus on media effects and on media literacy as the ‘cure’ for negative effects obscures a potentially more interesting aspect of the child/media/ nature relationship—the link between media and environmental literacies. For McBride and co-authors, environmental literacy “comprises an awareness of and concern about the environment and its associated problems, as well as the knowledge, skills, and motivations to work toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones” (2013: 3). Emerging in the 1960s alongside the writings of Rachel Carson and the concurrent understanding that it was no longer acceptable to be environmentally illiterate, environmental literacy gave birth to a range of related terms and concepts in the proceeding decades. Ecological literacy, for example, focuses “on the key ecological knowledge necessary for informed decision-­ making” (McBride et  al. 2013: 3). Environmentalist David Orr has

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written about ecological literacy in terms of affinity and a sense of kinship with the natural world; he states, If literacy is driven by the search for knowledge, ecological literacy is driven by the sense of wonder, the sheer delight in being alive in a beautiful, mysterious, bountiful world. (2011: 252)

Ecoliteracy, in turn, has been defined as the ability to “experience and understand how nature sustains life and how to live accordingly” (Center for Ecoliteracy 2014) while an ecoliterate person is one who: is prepared to be an effective member of sustainable society, with well-­ rounded abilities of head, heart, hands, and spirit, comprising an organic understanding of the world and participatory action within and with the environment. (McBride et al. 2013: 14)

Sustainability literacy, meanwhile, involves the knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets that enable humans to live sustainably and to make informed decisions towards building a sustainable future (United Nations 2018), while climate literacy can be described as “public understanding of human influence on climate and climate’s influence on humanity” and is considered a crucial step in reducing the gap between climate science and policy change (Cooper 2011: 231). We cannot conflate these various ‘literacies’, which—as McBride and co-authors (2013) have pointed out—contain specific sets of competencies that overlap but also diverge at times. In this book, I use the term ‘environmental literacies’ as a descriptor that acknowledges the differences between these various terms but recognises what they share: the combination of information, capability, action, and participation to activate ways of knowing that are essential for living and being in a climate-changed world. The term ‘literacy’ carries with it the shadow of its original meaning in relation to reading and writing. Media literacy, therefore, encompasses the competencies that allow audiences to receive (read) and produce (write) media material. When it comes to environmental literacies, this link to textual practices like reading and writing is less clear. Orr notes that ecological literacy incorporates the capacity to read and write but also “requires the more demanding capacity to observe nature with insight, a merger of landscape and mindscape” (2011: 252). For Code, however, such use of the term literacy to describe these ways of knowing is

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problematic. “The notion of ‘reading’”, Code argues, “has not been adequately considered or emphasized in articulations of ecoliteracy” (2019: 1268); he adds that definitions of ecoliteracy emphasise competency, knowledge, awareness, empathy, connection, and the capacity to make decisions, but that “these attributes could be called ecological awareness or sensitivity, and it is not yet clear how they justify being designated as literacy practices” (2019: 1271). To a certain extent, the application of the term ‘literacy’ to describe ecological knowledge and competencies is metaphorical, with the practices of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ used to connote the ability to understand the natural world and to share this understanding with others. Stibbe, however, proposes that labels like ‘environmental literacy’ or ‘sustainability literacy’ are not just metaphorical, “since so much of our understanding of society comes from things that we read, and writing is one of the primary ways that society can be influenced” (2007: 284). In this sense, media literacy—that is, the ability to ‘read and write’ effectively across media platforms—accompanies environmental literacies because it unlocks the gate to such understanding and influence. And if environmental literacies involve a new way of seeing, an unpicking of the seams of consumer culture and the ideologies that privilege progress in order to respect the needs of future generations as well as the Earth and its non-human inhabitants, then this cannot be separated from critical reading and the “critique of textual authority” (Hobbs 1998: 22) that media literacy entails. Armed with these intersecting literacies, a young media consumer might, for example, critically read an advertisement for a fossil fuel company, recognising elements of greenwashing in the company’s adoption of sustainability discourses. Someone who possesses environmental literacies is also able to participate in civic action and can collaborate with others to solve complex environmental problems. Importantly, these qualities are also emphasised in the newer understandings of media literacy that emerged in the context of digital culture and networked communication. Hobbs, for example, describes both digital and media literacies as “a constellation of life skills that are necessary for full participation in our media-saturated, information-­ rich society” (2010: xii). The so-called new media literacies de-emphasise textual critique and foreground new qualities, such as “play—the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving”, “collective intelligence—the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal”, and “negotiation—the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple

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perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms” (Jenkins 2009a: xiv). According to this newer definition, a media literate individual knows “how to campaign” and is empowered to “defend civil liberties” (Jenkins 2009a: 2)—they can also make informed ethical choices as “participants in online communities and as producers of media” (Jenkins 2009b). Such competencies align closely with environmental literacies, and it is in activism and civic participation that media and eco-literacies most closely coincide. This book proposes that media literacy and environmental literacies are not disparate sets of competencies—instead, they overlap in important ways. Both media and environmental literacies equip individuals (including young people) to act in a changing world and to be ethical contributors to environmental conversations. More broadly, this book recognises that there are deep and under-explored connections between healthy media systems, media literacy, and planetary well-being (Singh et al. 2015: 20). In his work on ecomedia literacy, Antonio López has addressed many of these connections, noting that “[i]n spirit… many of the aims and aspirations of media studies are in alignment with education for sustainability” (2013). However, López also reflects on the challenges he has faced in his efforts to bring media and environmental literacy together: “sustainability educators view media education antagonistically”, he writes, “and for media educators sustainability is seen as an unrelated, irrelevant issue” (2014: 4). Like López, I am interested in the spaces where media, literacy, and the environment coincide and interact. I recognise that media literacies and environmental literacies have both emerged as crucial skill-sets for current and future generations of children, and that increasingly the relationship between them is not antagonistic because these skill-sets are intertwined: young people need media skills in order to participate in urgent environmental conversations and to take environmental action, and it is vital that children, as audiences, people, and citizens, can understand, participate in, and intervene in media representations of environmental issues and problems. The question of whether children’s media texts can strengthen environmental literacies requires audience research that is beyond the scope of this book. What concerns me here is the possibility that the representational strategies and practices at work in children’s media texts contain invitations to adopt or align oneself with aspects of environmental literacies. In particular, and drawing from the above definitions, I am interested in three defining features of environmental literacy: knowledge about

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environmental problems, a sense of efficacy in the face of these problems, and environmental empathy or sensitivity. In the chapters ahead, I will explore these three aspects of environmental literacy as they are depicted, evoked, or ignited across a range of different media texts, beginning in Chap. 3 with children’s news. In doing so I will also consider how these invitations to become ‘eco-literate’ result in particular reproductions and configurations of children, the environment, and the child/nature relationship.

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Edwards, Susan, Helen Skouteris, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Leonie Rutherford, Mandy O’Conner, Ana Mantilla, Heather Morris, and Sue Elliot. 2016. Young Children Learning About Well-being and Environmental Education in the Early Years: A Funds of Knowledge Approach. Early Years 36 (1): 33–50. Elliott, Sue. 2015. Children in the Natural World. In Young Children and the Environment: Early Education for Sustainability, ed. Julie M.  Davis, 32–54. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Entman, Robert M. 1993. Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication 43 (4): 51–58. Fletcher, Robert. 2017a. Connection with Nature is an Oxymoron: A Political Ecology of “Nature-deficit Disorder”. The Journal of Environmental Education 48 (4): 226–233. ———. 2017b. Gaming Conservation: Nature 2.0 Confronts Nature-deficit Disorder. Geoforum 79: 153–162. Foster, Laura, and Yaroslav Lukov. 2019. Climate Change: Bafta Calls for More Environment Plot Lines on TV. BBC News, May 15. Accessed September 16, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-­environment-­48269930. Gauntlett, David. 2005. Moving Experiences: Media Effects and Beyond. Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing. Gerbner, George. 1998. Cultivation Analysis: An Overview. Mass Communication and Society 1 (3–4): 175–194. Global Wildlife Conversation. 2020. 10 Environmental Documentaries to Binge-­ watch Now. Accessed February 1, 2021. https://www.globalwildlife. org/10-­environmental-­documentaries-­to-­binge-­watch-­now/. Golin, Josh, and Melissa Campbell. 2017. Reining in the Commercialization of Childhood. In EarthEd: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet, ed. Worldwatch Institute, 155–164. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hansen, Anders. 2019. Environment, Media and Communication. London and New York: Routledge. Hansen, Anders, and David Machin. 2013. Researching Visual Environmental Communication. Environmental Communication 7 (2): 151–168. Hawley, Erin. 2018. Children’s Television, Environmental Pedagogy and the (un) Natural World of dirtgirlworld. Continuum 32 (2): 162–172. Hertz, J. C. 1999. Game Theory: Digital Theme Park Where Pokémon Roam. The New  York Times, September 2. Accessed April 2, 2021. http://www. nytimes.com/1999/09/02/technology/game-­theory-­digitaltheme-­park-­ where-­pokemon-­roam.html. Hey Parents!. n.d. Green Hour. Accessed February 13, 2021. https://www. thegreenhour.org/for-­parents/. Hobbs, Renee. 1998. The Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement. Journal of Communication 48 (1): 16–32.

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———. 2010. Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute and Knight Foundation. ———. 2017. Teaching and Learning in a Post-truth World. Educational Leadership 75 (3): 26–31. Howard, Philip N., Lisa-Maria Neudert, Nayana Prakash, and Steven Vosloo. 2021. Digital Misinformation/Disinformation and Children. New York: UNICEF. Jarratt, David. 2021. An Exploration of Webcam-travel: Connecting to Place and Nature through Webcams During the COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020. Tourism and Hospitality Research 21 (2): 156–168. Jenkins, Henry. 1998. Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Myths. In The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins, 1–37. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2006a. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press. ———. 2006b. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press. ———. 2007. Reconsidering Digital Immigrants… Confessions of an Aca-Fan, December 5. Accessed March 30, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/ reconsidering_digital_immigran.html. ———. 2009a. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2009b. New Media Literacies—A Syllabus. Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August 17. Accessed February 18, 2017. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/ new_media_literacies_-­_a_syll.html. Jenkins, Henry, Mizuko Ito, and Danah Boyd. 2016. Participatory Culture in a Networked Era. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Jones, Julia, Laura Thomas‐Walters, Niki Rust, and Diogo Veríssimo. 2019. ‘Nature Documentaries and saving Nature: Reflections on the New Netflix series Our Planet’. People and Nature 1: 420–425. Kahn, Peter H. 2002. Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia. In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, ed. Peter Kahn and Stephen Kellert, 93–116. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Kapur, Jyotsna. 2005. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Kellert, Stephen R. 2002. Experiencing Nature: Affective, Cognitive, and Evaluative Development in Children. In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, ed. Peter H. Kahn and Stephen R. Kellert, 117–151. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Kincaid, James. 1998. Erotic Innocence. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Lakoff, George. 2010. Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment. Environmental Communication 4 (1): 70–81. Livingstone, Sonia. 1996. On the Continuing Problems of Media Effects Research. In Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, 305–324. London: Arnold. ———. 2014. The Mediatization of Childhood and Education: Reflections on The Class. In Media Practice and Everyday Agency in Europe, ed. Leif Kramp, Nico Carpentier, Andreas Hepp, and Ilija Tomanic-Trivundza, 55–68. Bremen: Edition Lumière. López, Antonio. 2013. Greening a Digital Media Culture Course: A Field Report. Journal of Sustainability Education, February 5. http://www.jsedimensions. org/wordpress/?p=2306. ———. 2014. Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship. New York: Peter Lang. Louv, Richard. 2010. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-­ Deficit Disorder. London: Atlantic Books. Malone, Karen. 2007. The Bubble-wrap Generation: Children Growing up in Walled Gardens. Environmental Education Research 13 (4): 513–527. ———. 2016. Posthumanist Approaches to Theorizing Children’s Human-nature Relations. In Space, Place and Environment, ed. Karen Nairn, Peter Kraftl, and Tracey Skelton, 185–206. Singapore: Springer. Marsh, Jackie. 2010. Young Children’s Play in Online Virtual Worlds. Journal of Early Childhood Research 8 (1): 23–39. Marsh, Jackie, and Julia C.  Bishop. 2013. Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture From the 1950s to the Present Day. Maidenhead: Open University Press and McGraw Hill. McBride, Brooke B., C.A. Brewer, A.R. Berkowitz, and William T. Borrie. 2013. Environmental Literacy, Ecological Literacy, Ecoliteracy: What Do We Mean and How Did We Get Here? Ecosphere 4 (5): 1–20. McDougall, Julian. 2006. The Media Teacher’s Book. London: Hodder Arnold. McKibben, Bill. 1989. The End of Nature. New York: Penguin Randomhouse. McQuail, Denis. 1997. Audience Analysis. Thousand Oaks; London, and New Delhi: SAGE. Mitman, Gregg. 2009. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moss, Stephen. 2012. Natural Childhood. Swindon: National Trust. Naderer, Brigitte, and Suzanna J. Opree. 2021. Increasing Advertising Literacy to Unveil Disinformation in Green Advertising. Environmental Communication 15 (7): 923–936. Natale, Nicol. 2020. 15 Best Nature Documentaries to Watch on Netflix Right Now. Prevention, June 19. Accessed February 1, 2021. https://www.prevention.com/life/g32884332/best-­nature-­documentaries-­netflix/.

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CHAPTER 3

Transformation or Simplification: The Production of Environmental Knowledge in Children’s News

Cultural content is often simplified when it is adapted for a young audience. A wealth of research has been conducted into the simplification of literary classics for young readers and viewers, particularly when a shift from page to screen is involved (see, e.g., Hastings 1993; Kellogg 1993; Napolitano 2009). When it comes to factual material, this simplification process might include the abridging, localising, or even “purifying” of content, or a variety of engagement strategies that “popularise” complex concepts (Klingberg 2008; Bruti and Manca 2019). Importantly, such processes can make content accessible for young audiences. However, these adaptation practices can also produce problematic readings of the child audience, especially when it is assumed that adaptation of content for children must always involve a process of simplification: this has been referred to as “the dumbing down cliché” (Semenza 2008). At times, this simplification or dumbing-down process is described pejoratively as “Disneyfication” (Napolitano 2009), a term that has relevance well outside the realm of Disney films and can be understood as the process of addressing a child market by making complex source material sweeter and lighter, often by removing contentious, dark, or troubling elements of the original text(s). It is important to determine whether such ‘dumbing down’ is a force that influences the representation of environmental issues in children’s media, because this has bearing on the construction of both the environment and childhood itself in children’s media texts. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hawley, Environmental Communication for Children, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_3

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My concern in this chapter is with children’s news, and with the transformations (or simplifications) that enable environmental content to be accessed by children in this space. Having established in the previous chapters that children are an important market for environmentally themed media content, and that media can contribute to the development of children’s environmental literacies, Chap. 3 asks: how is news about the environment turned into a consumable object for children, who are not the target audiences for mainstream news outlets but who are increasingly addressed by child-specific news programmes? As argued in Chap. 1, ‘the environment’ is perceived by media-makers and storytellers to be a topic of interest for children due to the imagined link between childhood and nature. However, environmental problems come laden with “doom and gloom” connotations (Samuelsson and Kaga 2008: 11) and are often framed in terms of crisis, catastrophe, or conflict, particularly in the news media (Nisbet 2010; Trumbo 1996). For this reason, media-makers serving child audiences may feel compelled to transform information about the environment in a way that favours simplification. In doing so, they respond to a cultural understanding that children are, as Kaziaj and Bauwel put it, “incomplete and incompetent social actors with respect to adults” (2017: 230), and that childhood, in Alon-Tirosh and Lemish’s words, “is a period of naivety, pleasure, and worriless play” (2014: 109). In prior studies of children’s news, it has indeed been found that conservative views about childhood hinder or at least influence the adaptation process: as Julian Matthews has argued, such views can restrict “children’s access to knowledge, information and debate about important adult affairs” (2009: 2). Below, I consider whether this remains true of children’s environmental news today. I do so through a close analysis of texts produced by three children’s news programmes that regularly report on the environment. Identifying positivity as a prevailing feature of this news coverage, I question whether consolatory strategies are at work in these texts or whether we can read such positivity as part of a more radical transformation.

Children, News, and the Environment Historically, children occupied a marginal position as audiences for news and existed well outside the limits of the intended audience for most news outlets. As John Hartley recognised in 1998,

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Newspapers rarely imagine children as readers, except in special sections. Child-readers make their presence felt in the news most powerfully only as a generalized negative risk; they cause editors to inhibit coverage or display of dead bodies, violence, ‘bad’ language, or sexually explicit material. (1998: 10)

As Hartley implies here, the relationship between children and news was once understood in terms of exposure, risk, and harm. Accordingly, past studies of children and news tended to focus on the negative effects of news content on young audiences, including the political socialisation of children through exposure to news (Conway et  al. 1981) as well as adverse emotional reactions to news such as distress, fear, or sadness (Hoffner and Haefner 1994; Riddle et al. 2012; Cantor and Nathanson 1996). Today, however, there are more opportunities for children to engage with news than ever before, including those provided by childspecific news programmes. This mainstreaming of the child as a news consumer is related to an emerging belief that inclusion in the news audience is central to the development of a child’s sense of global citizenship, public belonging, and political responsibility (Carter 2017: 416). At the same time, children have been recognised as news-hungry audiences. In their survey of children’s perceptions of news in Israel, Alon-Tirosh and Lemish identified “a desire for age-appropriate news programs and content” (2014: 114)—their young participants wanted to be informed about current events, but did not feel addressed or served by adult news outlets. In the midst of concern over the future of news audiences, moreover, scholars have recognised the importance of forming “the habit for news” (Valenzuela et  al. 2019: 1096) in childhood years. Child-specific news outlets play an important role here, recognising children as potential news audiences rather than news ‘eavesdroppers’ and offering a training ground for news consumption along with important opportunities for the development of broader media literacy skills. Relatively little work has been conducted on children’s motivations for news consumption, but studies by Alon-Tirosh and Lemish (2014) and Notley et al. (2017) show that young audiences are drawn to news programmes out of curiosity, a desire to participate in a ‘grown-up’ ritual or habit, a need to feel more empowered in relation to local or global events, or a wish to be entertained. The production of children’s news is certainly informed by an understanding that children have distinct goals, needs, and motivations as news consumers (Matthews 2009). Accordingly, children’s

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news diverges in important ways from the conventions of mainstream news. In his study of three children’s television news programmes, David Buckingham observes the presence of adult “news values”—the unspoken principles that help news production teams determine what is newsworthy—but he also reflects on the extent to which each children’s news outlet “diverges from these values to a greater or lesser degree, and in ways which reflect their implicit assumptions about their audience” (1997: 124). Similarly, in their study of the Australian children’s newspaper Crinkling, English and co-authors found that “human interest” was the most prominent news value displayed (2019: 82), a notable contrast to adult news where conflict and proximity usually dominate (Harcup and O’Neill 2017). This indicates that the makers of children’s news often search for ways to personalise a story or foreground the connections between audience and subject matter. It also indicates that the makers of children’s news may be governed by unique ideas about newsworthiness, ideas that are intertwined with perceptions of the child audience. Interestingly, Buckingham also identifies the prominence of thematic rather than episodic framing in children’s news (1997: 126), which makes for another notable contrast to adult news where episodic framing usually dominates (Iyengar 1991). Thematic frames provide context for events and issues, rather than presenting them in isolation—the presence of such framing in children’s news may be due to a perceived need to explain and contextualise events for children. Again, these changes to the presentation of news with a child audience in mind are informed by, but also contribute to, a cultural construction of childhood. Children’s news both addresses and constructs the child, making “implicit assumptions about the child viewer—about what children are and about what they should be” (Buckingham 1997: 121). Creators of children’s news tend to regard “childhood as a time of innocence and joy, during which the child is unaffected by the concerns of the adult world” (English et al. 2019: 79). It may be, then, that old ideas about childhood innocence still dominate the production of children’s news—if so, this construction of the child audience has particular relevance when it comes to reporting on the environment. Like the children’s magazines and books discussed in Chap. 1, news programmes for children tend to include content that relates to ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’ because such topics are considered to be of interest to young people. In his study of children’s news, Buckingham observes that “it is striking how ecology is so often framed as a ‘children’s issue’” (1997:

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128). Writing a decade later, Matthews argues that environmental issues are seen to have a special newsworthiness for the child audience (2007: 432). Through analysis of interviews with journalists at the BBC’s Newsround, Matthews finds that animal stories often feature in environmental news for children and that animals are usually depicted in a favourable light, in contrast to humans who are often represented as the cause of environmental problems (2007: 434). Alon-Tirosh and Lemish similarly note that animals are considered a “children’s topic” in news, as opposed to topics like politics (2014: 118). The young participants in Alon-Tirosh and Lemish’s study also described the environment as important: something worth knowing about (2014: 116). Yet environmental stories are undoubtedly challenging for the makers of children’s news, particularly as issues like climate change come to dominate environmental conversations in the public sphere. In news coverage of climate change, there is often not a clear protagonist or central human figure—this poses difficulties when we consider English and co-authors’ claim that “human interest” is the dominant news value in children’s news (2019: 82). Moreover, environmental stories are often embedded in complex political, economic, and/or historical contexts, and—because environmental problems are ongoing—there is often not a clear resolution to the story. Environmental events and issues, therefore, are both desirable and challenging as subject matter for young news audiences. However, such problems are not unique to a child audience. When it comes to mainstream or adult news, ‘the environment’ does not easily fit into established categories of newsworthiness, and as Parham points out, news values “often conspire against environmental coverage” (2016: 97). Even for adults, environmental issues are difficult to report on due to their complexity: the meaning of an issue like climate change cannot always be arrived at very quickly, especially for time-poor audiences who are consuming news at speed. Neither can environmental issues be easily understood in isolation. As Hansen (2019: 87) contends, news is “event driven” and, therefore, when it comes to environmental issues, natural disasters receive far more news coverage than climate change itself as a complex and ongoing (and not easily visualised) problem. Nevertheless, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with the deepening of the ecological crisis, the place of environmental issues on the mainstream news agenda has strengthened and news outlets are devoting more resources to reporting on the environment (Andı 2020: 51; Pezzullo and Cox 2018: 95; Anderson 2014: 68). More so than ever before, then,

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news practices contribute to the production of meaning around environmental issues and the more-than-human world (Matthews 2007: 429). Yet much has been said about the inadequacy of environmental reporting today. Share notes that despite the good intentions of singular news outlets such as The Guardian, “[s]eldom are commercial media messages helpful to understanding the complexity of climate change in a way that motivates people to care and act” (2020: 289). In 2020, environmental commentator and thought leader David Suzuki called for “better media coverage” of ecological crises, as catastrophic events like global biodiversity decline were bumped off the news agenda by comparatively trivial occurrences such as the birth of a royal baby (Suzuki 2020). As Boykoff and Boykoff have noted, moreover, there is (or has been in the past) a “failed discursive translation between the scientific community and popular, mass-mediatized discourse” (2004: 134) whereby news coverage does not accurately represent the scientific consensus on climate change. When it comes to climate coverage, they write, “balanced reporting can actually be a form of informational bias” (2004: 126) because the inclusion of sources that question the scientific consensus on climate change—even in the name of journalistic objectivity—leads to the amplification of the voices of climate sceptics, a problem they label “balance as bias”. The relationship between news and the environment, then, is as fraught as it is vital. But do such problems persist in children’s environmental news? And how do journalists contend with these problems while simplifying, adapting, or transforming environmental content for children? The analysis below will attend to these questions.

Analysing Children’s Environmental News—CNN 10, Newsround, and BTN In order to explore how environmental news is created (or adapted) for a young audience, I analysed news coverage of the environment in three children’s news programmes: CNN 10 (in the US), the BBC’s Newsround (in the UK), and the ABC’s Behind the News or BTN (in Australia). A monitoring of news coverage across these three programmes was conducted over a fifty-day period in 2021  in order to determine how frequently environmental stories were reported on, what sorts of environmental stories were given prominence, and whether there were differences across the three programmes. Close textual analysis was also

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conducted of selected news stories produced by these programmes throughout 2019, 2020, and 2021. The news texts chosen for analysis included those about “milestone” environmental events or “critical discourse moments” (Fairclough 1995; Carvalho 2008), such as the IPBES report on global biodiversity decline in 2019 and the youth-led climate strikes of the same year. These milestone events can also be considered newsworthy in terms of traditional ‘adult’ news values and therefore they provide important opportunities to study the variations between adult and child-centric news coverage of the environment. The three news programmes chosen for analysis in this chapter are, in their respective national contexts, prominent and long-standing sources of news for children. CNN 10, part of the Cable News Network (CNN) in the US, is a daily, ten-minute, digital and on-demand news programme designed specifically for children. Like both BTN and Newsround, CNN 10 is designed to be watched in the classroom; the CNN 10 website contains resources for schools, and teachers can sign up to receive a daily email about the stories that will be covered in the next episode. The programme is positioned as a child-friendly version of an adult news programme, adhering to the values of timeliness and impact that define CNN as a media outlet (CNN 2020). Newsround, meanwhile, is a long-running children’s news programme that has been produced by the BBC since 1972. Aimed at children aged six to ten (BBC 2011), it offers a ten-­ minute episode each weekday, broadcast on the CBBC channel in the UK, on YouTube, and on the Newsround website, where children can also access a range of online news content. BTN, in turn, is an Australian news programme broadcast on the ABC, Australia’s public broadcaster, targeting children aged eight to thirteen (ABC n.d.). BTN was launched in 1968 and has long been used as a resource in Australian schools, with primary-school teachers reporting that they often use the programme as an entry-point for class discussions and activities about current events (Beveridge 2009: 74)—a reminder that children’s news programmes can introduce young audiences to the conventions of news and to the very idea of ‘currency’, as well as to the practice of news consumption itself. These three children’s news programmes are each linked to a ‘parent’ news outlet with a specific news agenda that shapes the coverage of environmental issues. CNN, for example, is a commercial media company owned by the conglomerate WarnerMedia. Less conservative than other mainstream US news outlets, CNN has been shown to affirm the urgency of climate change more than some of its competitors (Parks 2020: 89).

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The ABC and the BBC, in turn, are public broadcasters in Australia and the UK, respectively, each with strict editorial policies relating to objectivity and fairness. In the past, both the BBC and the ABC have faced criticism for false balance in their coverage of climate change (see Meade 2020; Hamilton 2010; Carrington 2018); however, this has been corrected over time. Journalists at the ABC today are guided to “follow the weight of evidence” when reporting on topics like climate change (Muller 2020), while the BBC in 2018 released internal guidance stating that climate change is scientifically proven and should be reported on (Carrington 2018). Interestingly, this internal guidance referred specifically to calls from younger audiences for more news coverage of climate change (Hickman 2018). All three of these children’s news programmes report on the environment. Indeed, in each programme, environmental stories sit alongside stories about politics, technology, celebrity, sport, and other current events (including, during 2020 and 2021, stories about the coronavirus pandemic). The ‘environmental’ issues covered by the three programmes range from climate change and climate activism to conservation and sustainability, while environmental angles are often taken on stories about food, waste, and farming. Both CNN 10 and Newsround have weekly segments dedicated to environmental news, entitled “Call to Earth” and “Your Planet”, respectively, while BTN runs occasional special episodes dedicated wholly to environmental news (such as their “Environmental Sustainability Special” on 10 June 2020). This indicates that environmental issues are considered newsworthy for a child audience by the practitioners at each news outlet—that the special newsworthiness of ‘the environment’ for children, identified by Matthews (2007), and the broader sense that children and ecology “go naturally together” (Coward 1990: 41), is guiding the choices made by these practitioners. Over the fifty-day period in which my monitoring was undertaken, 50% of Newsround’s episodes contained an environmental story, and environmental news was only slightly less prominent in BTN (42%) and CNN 10 (38%). There were peaks and troughs in the news coverage of environmental events and issues by all three news programmes, with a high frequency of environmental stories during COP26 in 2021, and low frequency during the pre-­ Christmas period of the same year. Across the three news programmes, climate change, conservation, and waste management were the three most frequently covered topics relating to the environment in this fifty-day period. However, while climate change

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was frequently covered by BTN and Newsround, it was only occasionally mentioned by CNN 10. There was, then, a slight variation in what exactly about ‘the environment’ was deemed newsworthy by each programme. Nevertheless, conservation and waste management were consistently covered by all three programmes. The prevalence of stories about endangered species and conservation efforts is unsurprising, given that these stories are often accompanied by footage of cute or exotic animals and equally exotic locations—rainforests, mountains, the ocean depths. Conservation stories are therefore transportive experiences for the young audience, granting them access to an otherwise inaccessible place. Conservation stories are also, by nature, hopeful; they revolve around human efforts to ‘save’ non-­ human animals, often showcasing the work of individuals or small not-for-­ profit organisations, and in doing so they perform a sense of human efficacy in the face of environmental problems. Similarly, stories about waste—especially plastic waste—allow both the problem and the solution to be easily visualised; images of people picking up rubbish, for example, signify the transformation of a natural location from polluted to pristine. In both conservation and waste management stories, across all three news programmes, humans tend to be identified as both part of the problem and part of the solution. Stories about non-human animals are common in all three news programmes. This in itself is not surprising and echoes the findings of others about the prevalence of animal stories in children’s news (Matthews 2007; Alon-Tirosh and Lemish 2014), and in children’s literature and culture more broadly (Spencer 2010). Interestingly, though, the frequency with which animals are made present in the news coverage of environmental issues for children and the tendency to use animals as a focal point in these environmental stories results in a radical privileging of the non-human perspective that we would not expect to find in adult news coverage of similar issues. For example, a BTN story about the effect of heat on bat populations (25 November 2021) playfully invites young viewers to compare their feelings about hot weather with the experiences of the animals: It’s been a bit of a wet week for many Aussies, but I promise, summer is coming. And for some of our native animals, it presents some unique challenges that require creative solutions… Yep, turns out these not-so-little guys hate being hot as much as the rest of us, but probably wouldn’t be allowed at the public pool, mostly because of the bat thing.

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This playful entry to the story, which goes on to explain how climate change has impacted bat populations living in Western Sydney, encourages children to adopt a non-human perspective on the issue of rising temperatures, and creates pathways to that perspective through invitations to activate imagination and empathy, as well as humour. This is significant because some scholars have called for just such an inclusive approach to non-human animal sources in mainstream (adult) journalism. Responding to the lack of non-human animal perspectives and voices in adult news, Freeman and co-authors argue that there is a need for journalists to recognise that “other animals have interests, desires, thoughts, feelings, and points of view concerning what happens to them and that we can understand and explain their cognitive, emotional, and moral lives” (2011: 590). Arguably, this inclusiveness is already present in children’s news. Perhaps this is due to an imagined sense that children care about animals more than adults do and that animal stories are therefore more newsworthy for children—however, it can also be argued that the incorporation of non-human perspectives is an easier achievement in children’s news because it already suffuses children’s culture and literature: children are familiar with stories that incorporate animal voices and involve seeing through an animal’s eyes; indeed, very young children often grow up with such stories and are therefore accustomed to the idea that non-human animals have rights, voices, and individual as well as collective needs. On the topic of animals, then, children’s news offers an opportunity for intervention in adult-centric ways of thinking because human superiority is not always assumed. There are important differences in the way these three programmes package ‘the environment’ for interpretation by young audiences. Most notably, CNN 10 tends to favour stories about environmental stewardship rather than environmental activism. Children are rarely depicted as leading social actors in this news programme’s environmental stories. Instead, adults model pro-­environmental behaviour, care, and eco-citizenship for the young audience. For example, in a story about the vulnerability of manta rays in the Maldives (20 January 2021), humans are identified as part of the problem, with commercial fishing noted as the biggest threat to the species alongside deteriorating conditions in the rays’ habitat. The viewers are then presented with the solution to the problem, in the form of the Maldivian Manta Ray conservation project. Quotes from an adult spokesperson, Beth Faulkner, are used to express care and respect for the animals: “Once you see a manta ray, there’s no way you couldn’t care

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about them. Being in the water with them, you understand how gentle they are, how charismatic they are”. In such stories, the act of caring is shown to be productive and empowering; humans who care, we are told, can act to protect endangered species and ecosystems. However, adults rather than children are depicted by CNN 10 as the main agents of care and as the gatekeepers of pro-environmental action. It is also notable that CNN 10 did not cover the youth-led climate activism events of 2019 or any similar activist events during the sample period. In contrast, both BTN and Newsround frequently report on environmental activism as well as environmental stewardship and often depict children as empowered social actors. For example, one BTN story (10 June 2020) about Perth school children working with the Western Australian Seed Centre refers to the kids as “superheroes”; the theme from the superhero franchise The Avengers plays over footage of the children getting “suited up” in lab coats and safety glasses, and the children are described by the reporter as being “on a mission” to save endangered plants. Such stories emphasise child agency, and children are depicted acting in a ‘grown-up’ way (working hard, pitching in, solving problems) while still ‘being kids’ (having fun, being playful). A similar ‘hero frame’ is constructed in BTN’s coverage of the student climate protests of 2019. Children’s voices are included in these climate activism stories, and indeed, children are depicted as eloquent and serious spokespeople on the issue of climate change—as voices worth listening to. “We are the future, and if nothing’s done about it now, then when we’re older it’s going to be absolute mayhem”, a child states in one such story; another tells the reporter, “at the moment we’re not seeing our right to a liveable climate upheld by politicians—they’re not considering us when they’re making their laws” (BTN 18 March 2019). Such quotes contribute to an overall framing of climate change as a rights issue; intergenerational justice is emphasised. Newsround took a similar approach, reporting on the 2019 climate strikes and on later instances of climate activism, and using children as sources, often interviewing children about their reasons for participating in the activism. COP26, in particular, was covered extensively by Newsround in October and November 2021, with a range of stories featuring interviews with children as well as depictions of climate activism: at key points in Newsround’s coverage of COP26, children were asked to contribute their questions, feelings, and responses to the event (e.g., 2 November 2021 and 10 November 2021). This inclusion of children as sources mimics the inclusion of young people in the COP26 news narrative as it unfolded for

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adults: for, as noted in Chap. 1, children were made visible in media representations of the conference, both because they were evoked by adult authority figures like Frans Timmermans (who presented audiences with an image of his grandson) and because young people were key players in the climate activism that surrounded the event. The tendency to include children as both news sources and news subjects is also evident in a pair of BTN stories (9 March 2021 and 28 May 2021) about a group of Australian teenagers who engaged in a court battle with the Federal Environment Minister, the outcome of which was the finding that the Australian government had a duty of care to protect young people and future generations from the impacts of climate change and environmental damage. “These teenagers are watching a court hearing”, the reporter announces in the first story. “Sure, it’s not your everyday after-school activity. But they’re the ones who started the case”. Climate activism is represented here as more than street protests and marches—it is also represented as something children can do, but not an ‘everyday’ childlike practice. The children, in turn, are depicted as social actors and rights-­ holders in relation to climate change. “I hope they listen to us”, one of the children states, “but I also hope they see how powerful we are together” (9 March 2021). With its emphasis on intergenerational justice and child empowerment, BTN is framing its climate activism stories here in a way that matches the framing practices enacted by young climate activists themselves (as we will see in Chap. 7). This indicates that the production of children’s environmental media is at least partially influenced by the discursive work of these young activists, a point to which I will return in my final chapter. It is significant that both BTN and Newsround include children as sources in their environmental stories, while CNN 10 does not. This indicates that children’s voices are not automatically privileged by children’s news outlets—the inclusion of children’s voices is based on decision-­ making processes undertaken by the programme’s producers, and these decisions may be informed by many aspects of the news production process, from time limitations (it is difficult and time-consuming to conduct interviews with children) to a desire to adhere to conventions of adult news (where children do not regularly feature as sources), to assumptions about what counts as expertise in relation to environmental news. Nevertheless, there are some commonalities in the source selection practices of these three programmes, with scientists, conservationists, academics, and environmental thought leaders the most prevalent sources selected

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for inclusion. Notably, politicians are rarely interviewed directly in the environmental stories produced by the three programmes. This is interesting given that studies of mainstream news coverage have found that political actors are increasingly important as sources in environmental news, while scientists have become less dominant (Anderson 2014: 70; Trumbo 1996: 281). Evidently, this pattern is not present in children’s environmental news. This may indicate an assumption by the media-makers that young audiences are less interested in politicians (or in political conflict) than they are in environmental issues; it may also indicate that it is difficult for the makers of a children’s news programme to access political spokespeople, especially if the programme is deemed less important, worthy of attention, or useful for reaching target publics than mainstream news. Resultantly, the “primary definers” (Hall et al. 2013) of children’s environmental news are adults—and sometimes, children—who are participating in the work of tackling environmental problems. This helps to enforce a solutions-based approach to reporting on the environment, which I will explore in more detail below. All three programmes employ a mode of address that partially resembles that of adult news. News anchors and reporters speak in a direct, clear, factual, and present-focused way. Data and statistics are used to demonstrate the impactful nature of events or issues, and quotes from sources are used to add colour and personality, while the reporter’s language tends to remain objective (although not always serious, as I will show below). Environmental issues tend to be covered in a balanced way by the three programmes, with both sides of the story represented, and in this way the young viewer is addressed as “a participant in a debate, judging the contending arguments” (Buckingham 1997: 129), although given concerns about “balance as bias” in adult news, it is significant that neither climate sceptics nor climate deniers were used as sources in the environmental stories analysed here. It can be surmised that concerns about the effect of misinformation on children, discussed in Chap. 2, lead the creators of children’s news to approach the journalistic principle of ‘balance’ with great care when it comes to environmental news. In this sense, the young audiences of CNN 10, Newsround, and BTN are positioned as emerging news consumers, and ‘the environment’ is depicted as an issue not just of interest but of global significance—a topic that should be understood and critically engaged with, whose complexities deserve the attention of the child audience.

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There are, however, notable child-centric inflections on the mode of address used by all three news outlets. Unsurprisingly, the time taken to explain complex issues and events is far longer than is common in adult news stories, with a ‘teacherly’ mode of address adopted at times. This can be attributed not just to the young age of the audience but to the fact that children’s news outlets tend to report once or twice on issues or events that receive rolling coverage in adult news outlets, often from many different angles: there is, therefore, less of an expectation in children’s news that the audience is familiar with the intricacies of the story. A questioning or inquiry-based mode of address is also used in all three news programmes, marking another notable point of distinction from their adult counterparts. Questions are often used to incite curiosity, or as engagement strategies: a BTN story about fires in the Amazon rainforest, for example, begins with the question, “have you ever heard of a pink river dolphin?” (2 September 2019). CNN 10, meanwhile, includes a trivia question in each episode, and these are often used as entry-points to environmental stories, especially those that involve exotic locations or non-human animals. The CNN 10 anchor also uses an exuberant mode of address, making jokes and puns and beginning the programme with exclamations such as “Fridays are awesome!”, while simultaneously maintaining a sense of newsreaderly gravitas. Of the three programmes, BBC’s Newsround sticks most closely to a traditional, expected mode of address for news, while BTN is the most divergent, at times using skit-style acting, comedy, and metaphor alongside more formal modes of address. A BTN story entitled “Plastic Pact” (24 May 2021), for example, which reported on the signing of a pact by supermarkets and global brands in Australia to eliminate single-use plastics by 2025, featured the reporter in a restaurant having a romantic meal with a humorous creature constructed of various plastic items. “I know I used you in the beginning, but I regret it now”, the reporter says to her plastic boyfriend. “You’re just way too clingy—I see you everywhere and you’re so suffocating”. Metaphor is used in a playful manner here to demonstrate that the ‘love affair’ between humans and plastic is ending. These strategies are similar to the textual features identified by Bruti and Manca in their analysis of National Geographic Kids, which include a question-and-­ answer format, colloquial language, and the use of vague terms and informal expressions, all of which contribute to a mode of address that “shortens the distance between the writer and the reader” and tends to be “more peer-to-peer rather than expert to non-expert” (2019: 198–199). Devices like metaphor, play, and a questioning approach also serve to construct an

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image of childhood in relation to environmental problems: the inscribed audience is imagined here to be interested in such problems but able to approach them in a playful, humorous, and open-minded way.

A Soft Approach? In May 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released a report identifying a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity due to human impact. A milestone moment in the history of the human/nature relationship, this event was reported on by both Newsround and BTN (although not by CNN 10). Due to the distressing nature of the event and the ease with which it fits a crisis and catastrophe frame, it provides fertile ground for analysis of how children’s programmes report on environmental problems and whether, or to what extent, environmental problems are softened or simplified when reported on for a child audience. The features of children’s environmental news identified in this chapter so far, including the use of engaging, questioning, humorous, or playful modes of address and the inclusion of children as sources, may be distinctive elements of these children’s news programmes, but they do not in themselves imply a softening process: an environmental problem can be reported on in a playful or questioning way while still exploring its complexities and challenging aspects; in turn, a questioning or playful tone does not necessarily preclude a hard-hitting approach. With this in mind, the following section offers a close textual analysis of the coverage of the IPBES global biodiversity report, with attention paid to BTN and Newsround as well as to their adult-centric counterparts, ABC News and BBC News. An examination of individual news stories by BBC News (6 May 2019), ABC News (6 May 2019), Newsround (7 May 2019), and BTN (13 May 2019) shows that the issue of biodiversity decline was depicted across all four programmes as monumental and devastating. In each case, humans are blamed for global biodiversity loss, but the problem is depicted as multifaceted. The adult BBC story describes the report as “the most powerful indictment of how humans have treated their only home”, while Newsround states that “[t]he causes of much of this species loss can be traced to human actions”. The adult ABC story, meanwhile, explains that “human use of the land and sea resources are mostly to blame, followed by direct exploitation of animals, climate change, pollution and invasive species”, while BTN identifies land clearing, overfishing, and plastic pollution

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as key aspects of the problem. However, there are also notable differences between adult and child versions of the story. As expected given the age of the target audience, more time is devoted to contextualising and explaining the report in the BTN and Newsround stories. The BTN story, for example, explains the history and science behind mass extinction events, defines the term “holocene extinction”, and also explains why some prefer the term anthropocene extinction—“because scientists think humans are the ones making this extinction happen”. As this quote indicates, sources are also less distinct in the children’s news stories, which refer to unnamed ‘scientists’ rather than the named experts and thought leaders used as sources in the adult news stories. The language is also softened in the children’s news stories, and this softening is particularly evident upon examination of the headline and lead of the adult BBC story in comparison with the Newsround story. The BBC’s headline—“Nature crisis: Humans threaten 1  m species with extinction”—emphasises the harshness and impactful nature of the report, and constructs an attribution of responsibility frame (Semetko and Valkenburg 2000) whereby humans are blamed for the crisis. The lead, similarly, is harsh and impactful: “On land, in the seas, in the sky, the devastating impact of humans on nature is laid bare in a compelling UN report”. The headline for the Newsround story emphasises similar facts but takes a notably gentler approach: “One million species face extinction, says UN”, reads the headline, and the lead introduces the story with the simple sentence, “One million species face extinction as a result of human actions, according to a new report”. The most obvious changes here are the removal of certain adjectives, and it may be that “devastating” and “compelling” were considered too linguistically challenging for young readers, but we can also speculate that the horrifying aspect of the news story has been tempered to make it suitable for children even while the attribution of responsibility frame is maintained. Strong language is also evident throughout the adult BBC story, which contains multiple references to harm and wounding: we are told that “humans are ravaging the very ecosystems that support their societies” and, elsewhere, that “while the Earth has always suffered from the actions of humans through history, over the past 50 years, these scratches have become deep scars”. In the Newsround story, interestingly, the chosen words signify death and dying rather than wounding: “pollinating insects like bees are dying”, young audiences are told, “and polluted waters are killing protein-rich fish and limiting clean drinking water”. This is a less violent, though equally tragic, way of

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describing the relationship between human actions and planetary destruction, although the reference to “polluted waters” makes clear the causal link in this relationship. It must also be noted that the Newsround story is significantly shorter than its adult counterpart, resulting in a less detailed discussion of the report’s contents. In the ABC’s coverage of the report for adult audiences, meanwhile, impactful language is contained particularly within quotes. Tim Beshara, federal policy director of not-for-profit organisation The Wilderness Society, is quoted as stating that “[h]umanity is causing a slow-motion apocalypse of the natural world and that’s getting faster and faster as time goes on”, while a quote from Sir Robert Watson, one of the report’s leading authors, further emphasises the gravity of the problem: Fundamentally, we’re sleepwalking into an extinction crisis. We’re not talking about the biosphere in the way that we need to. Nature is getting eroded in a dramatic way and a loss of natural capital means that humans will suffer in the long run.

Quotes are not used in BTN’s version of the story, and this results in language that is less damning. Interestingly, though, language is used by the BTN reporter to directly evoke a shift from human to non-human perspectives: the story begins with the reporter stating that life on Earth for humans is the “peachiest” it has ever been, while non-human animals—“the Earth’s other inhabitants”—are experiencing deteriorating conditions. The BTN story also describes the report as “grim”; mournful music plays and we see footage of the natural world—bees, a giant tree, a vast forest—while we are told by the reporter that “nature is experiencing the fastest decline in history”. Room is made here for an emotional response to the story. Despite this occasional gloominess, the story ends on a hopeful note: “there are plenty of people all around the world trying to change things”, the viewer is told as images of climate activism are shown. Solutions are identified, including the reduction of plastic waste and the slowing of global warming. “It’s a monumental task”, the reporter concludes, “but some say it is possible if we work together”. This positive inflection at the end of the story, which is present to a lesser degree in the Newsround story, can be interpreted as a form of consolation and reassurance, a strategy to reduce anxiety in the young audience. Such strategies are indeed important at a time when eco-anxiety is experienced by young people (Strife 2012). However, this positive, emotional, and

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future-focused approach to reporting on a distressing event can also be interpreted as a radical and productive intervention in traditional ways of reporting on the environment—a possibility that will be explored in more detail below.

Adaptation and Transformation The children’s environmental news stories analysed in this chapter are, to a certain extent, faithful to the conventions of adult news. However, as shown above, these news programmes also construct a distinctively childlike space: the language is eager to engage, the approach is playful, and there are subtle changes in how environmental narratives unfold in this space, particularly when dealing with complex and potentially upsetting issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, or environmental degradation. What we can identify here is an interplay between faithfulness to the conventions of mainstream environmental news and key changes to suit the (imagined) child audience. This combination of fidelity and transformation can be examined through the lens of adaptation theory. In literary and film studies, an ‘adaptation’ is a reimagining of media content or a translation of a story from one textual form to another. In Linda Hutcheon’s words, an adaptation is “an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (2013: 170). Scholarly work in adaptation studies traditionally focused on the shift from page to screen (most notably, the adaptation of literature into film), but in today’s media landscape adaptation is complex: shifts, changes, and transformations of media material are common, and adaptation is often used by media-­makers as a strategy for widening or changing the audience of existing media content. As Hutcheon notes, “not every adaptation is necessarily a remediation” and “not all adaptations necessarily involve a shift of medium or mode of engagement, though many do” (2013: 170). Children’s news, by this definition, is a type of adaptation even though the textual content is being adapted from one news outlet to another. Indeed, as Tenenboim-­ Weinblatt and Baden argue (2018), journalism in all its forms draws on existing textual material and adapts it for publication, turning the raw material of a real event into a news story. In this sense we can describe news-making itself as a type of adaptation, or at least recognise the transformative aspects of journalism as a process: “Applying a variety of transformations to source texts”, Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Baden write, “journalists select specific contents to be quoted, amplified, summarized,

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elaborated, reformulated, or downplayed, and thereby turn them into news texts” (2018: 482). Making news for children involves another layer of transformation, taking either real-world events or news stories written for adults and adapting them for child readers or viewers, making specific changes to the content in response to the distinct needs of the readership. Unusually, the adaptation in this case obscures the source text rather than revealing it: while the creators of a screen adaptation of a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel may hope that their young viewers will discover the source material through the adaptation, child audiences are encouraged to engage with news programmes made specifically for them but not, usually, to follow the trail back to adult news stories as the source. It is often recognised that adaptation plays on the pleasures of repetition and difference: audiences enjoy seeing their favourite tales retold in new forms or from new perspectives (Hutcheon 2013). But as Hutcheon notes, there is also “the pleasure of accessibility that drives not only adaptation’s commercialization but also its role in education” (2013: 117, my emphasis). In the case of children’s news, adaptation involves granting access to knowledge about current events (specifically, here, environmental events and issues) as well as access to knowledge about news itself as a media form. In this sense, the very act of producing environmental news for children encourages both media and environmental literacy by granting young readers access to environmental stories and to the practice of decoding mediated representations of environmental issues. Important to this analysis, then, is the debate in adaptation studies around the need for fidelity (see Stam 2005; Leitch 2003, 2007; Whelehan 1999). Most adaptations are defined by an interplay between fidelity and infidelity: that is, they contain varying degrees of faithfulness to the original or the source text. When it comes to producing (or curating) children’s environmental news, the key questions about fidelity are these: what interplay between fidelity and infidelity is required to grant access to the story, and what level of infidelity is needed to ensure children are not alienated by either the content or the format? Buckingham describes children as “novices” when it comes to news as a genre (1997: 120), in which case a sense of fidelity to news itself is important because it cultivates understanding of the codes and conventions of news. In the case of environmental news, a children’s programme that reports on the environment in the same detailed, thoughtful way as (ideally) an adult news outlet will help children engage productively with environmental problems and develop eco-citizenship.

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This chapter has shown that environmental news is sometimes simplified when adapted for children. For example, complex details were removed and language softened in news coverage of the 2019 mass extinction report by BTN and Newsround. The absence of stories about climate activism on CNN 10 itself suggests simplification or softening—a removal of a complex, conflict-ridden issue from the news narrative. What I have shown, however, is that children’s news programmes transform but do not necessarily simplify all aspects of the environmental stories they adapt, nor do they take a simplification approach by default. One of the key transformations at work in these stories is the creation of a childlike space—one that is playful as well as serious, hopeful as well as grim, at times marked by fantasy or at least a more imaginative perspective than we would expect to find in mainstream news. The use of children as sources is also a key transformation, and although this only occurred in two of the three news outlets analysed, it was a frequently recurring feature of these two programmes (BTN and Newsround). The inclusion of child voices is itself a radical transformation of news as a media form within which children are often “ignored” and are “not considered to be interesting news subjects” (Kaziaj and Bauwel 2017: 237). For programmes like BTN and Newsround, the focus on children as sources also becomes a way of transforming environmental stories that are otherwise not specifically about childhood. For example, a BTN story entitled “Drought Breaking” (25 August 2020) takes a child’s perspective on an issue often covered by Australian mainstream news: the impact of drought on farming communities. The journalists interview children who have lived through drought: one boy shares his experiences at school in the middle of dust storms caused by prolonged dryness; other children talk about the stresses of drought and the related feelings of sadness. The audience is then shown joyful images of children celebrating the rainfall that breaks the drought. “What we did when it started raining was we all just went in the rain and danced in the rain, cos we were happy to get it”, one girl says; “it’s been like something lifted off your shoulders”, explains another. Children are depicted here as a central rather than peripheral part of the ongoing narrative about drought and its impact on farming communities. It is important here that children are given a space to speak without being shadowed by adult voices. The child’s unique way of speaking is also privileged: these are children speaking as children; they are not pretending to be adults. This introduction of a different way of speaking arguably acts on the telling of the story in a deeply transformative manner. In particular, the child’s perspective opens the way

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to a more emotion-filled story that centres around sadness and joy, hardship and celebration. This is not necessarily a simplification of the issue and is better described as an alternative angle generated by the decision to focus on children as sources. If we consider this story to be an introduction to an issue that may be considered grown-­up, complex, or difficult, we can argue here that children’s news outlets like BTN provide more than just a primer for news consumption—they are gateways that allow children to join the story, both as audiences and as news subjects. Another key transformation at work in children’s environmental news can be found in the uplifting nature of the stories. As we have seen in this chapter, the environmental crisis is reported on—to varying extents—by children’s news programmes. However, the crisis is not usually the end of the story, and most children’s news stories about environmental crises have a hopeful end, often concluding with an emphasis on action. For example, a CNN 10 story about degradation in the Amazon rainforest (26 March 2021) does not shy away from the severity of the problem, but reports on the work of an ecological research team who are planting tree corridors to connect fragments of forest for local species. “What I really love about being in the forest”, an interviewee from the project states, “is seeing the size of the change we can really make. Is it really possible to bring all that forest back?” The crisis is not the end of the story here, precisely because it may be “possible” to “bring back” what has been lost or damaged. This tendency towards a strong positive ending in stories about potentially upsetting environmental events can be linked to the child audience: their needs, but also the way in which they are imagined and represented in the cultures surrounding the production and consumption of these news texts. This is a clear construction of the readership not as world-­weary grown-ups whose hope has been eroded, but as eager young minds looking to change the world. However, this construction serves adult needs, first and foremost, because it preserves an important myth about childhood in which children are signs of the future, emblems of hope, and, to take Kincaid’s approach (described in Chap. 2), empty vessels to be filled with meaning by adults (1998). The consistent use of positive endings in environmental news narratives for children can also be described as a consolatory gesture designed to reassure the young audience or minimise the harm caused to them. As Van Der Molen and De Vries have pointed out, the transformation of news into its child-friendly format sometimes involves “consolation strategies” (2003), whereby efforts are made to reduce anxiety and ensure the child

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readers that everything will be alright. Arguably, consolation strategies must be part of the transformation process, because in some cases this is what allows quite disturbing yet important environmental news stories to reach children. However, I propose that there is something more than consolation at work in many of these stories. Recent work on environmental communication has shown that positivity can be effective at enabling adult audiences to engage with environmental problems in a way that is energising rather than paralysing, and that a positive approach to environmental problems can involve radical interventions in established ways of thinking (McAfee et  al. 2019; Chadwick 2015; Marlon et  al. 2019). Positivity and an emphasis on solutions in environmental news may therefore be as constructive as it is consolatory for young audiences. Indeed, the approach taken to covering the environment by children’s news outlets aligns with “constructive journalism”, an emerging practice in news reporting (for adults) that involves “applying positive psychology techniques to news processes and production in an effort to create productive and engaging coverage, while holding true to journalism’s core functions” (McIntyre and Gyldensted 2017: 20). The environmental stories analysed in this chapter contain many of the key features of a constructive approach to journalism: in particular, they employ a solutions-oriented frame rather than simply informing the audience about problems, and they are futurefocused, with “a strong inclination to look further than only the events of the day” (Hermans and Drok 2018: 686). This means that the childlike perspective employed in children’s news aligns with a radical approach to journalism for adults that acknowledges the fullness of the relationship between journalism and society and “rethinks how contemporary journalists could, or should, fulfill their democratic and societal roles” (Mast et al. 2019: 494). Constructive journalism in adult-centric news outlets, meanwhile, may also allow children to feel more included as part of the news audience, particularly because, as Kleemans and co-authors have pointed out, it allows news to be presented in an emotionally appropriate way for children (2019: 580). This is especially applicable to environmental news, which is highly relevant for young people but has the potential to elicit strong emotional reactions (like aversion or fear) if reported in a way that emphasises catastrophe, crisis, or irreparable planetary damage. What is particularly interesting about the way children’s news programmes report on the environment is the practice of making space for a range of emotional responses, including concern, sadness, anger, frustration, hope, and wonder. In this way, children’s environmental news has

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the potential to facilitate a productive relationship between young audiences and the environment, while also embodying trends that are emerging in the broader realm of ‘adult’ journalism—for, as Beckett and Deuze (2016) have pointed out, emotion is becoming a more important dynamic in news production and consumption, particularly as individuals’ engagement with the world around them becomes more personalised, and as the news industry seeks to become a “meaningful, insightful, and trustworthy part of an emerging affective media ecosystem” (2016: 1). Put another way, current trends in mainstream journalism have childlike aspects to them: they are hopeful, future-focused, and emotionally open. The ‘child’s-eye view’ may therefore have much to offer environmental journalism and news production more broadly.

The Challenge of Environmental News for Children It is worth noting that apart from the work of Matthews (2007), and passing mentions of the environment in broader studies of children’s news (see, e.g., Buckingham 1997), there have been very few close examinations of environmental news for children. Nevertheless, as this chapter has demonstrated, the topic is worthy of further academic attention because the environment is reported on in children’s news, and children’s news programmes do contribute to the production of meaning about environmental issues. The above analysis demonstrates that a range of environmental issues, events, and problems are represented in children’s news programmes. Stories about climate change, conservation, and waste dominate, but deforestation, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss are also covered, as is climate activism, although this last topic was not present in one of the three news programmes examined here, indicating that its inclusion in the news narrative for children is still, at times, judged to be inappropriate by adult media-makers. This chapter has examined how environmental news is adapted and transformed, rendering it a consumable object for young audiences. I have argued that simplification and consolation are part of this adaptation process, but that they do not define it. Stam notes that filmic adaptations of literary texts “might be seen as filling in the lacunae of the source novels, calling attention to their structuring absences” (2005: 9). But when environmental media is transformed for a child audience, what sort of silences or gaps in our environmental narratives are ‘filled’? It is often tempting to examine children’s media in terms of what it lacks; however, it is also

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productive to consider what a children’s media text adds to the representational processes and politics through which environmental issues are made visible. I will investigate this further in Chap. 4 when I turn my attention to children’s television programmes. The chapters ahead will also confirm what this chapter has demonstrated: that an analysis of children’s environmental media tells us much about perceptions of childhood and the child/nature relationship. The news texts analysed here invite their young readers to adopt a position of care in relation to nature: in doing so, they construct an understanding that it is ‘okay’ for children to confront environmental crisis and catastrophe, but they also, somewhat problematically, contribute to a cultural perception that ecological awareness is an implicit part of childhood in the twenty-first century. There is a danger here that, just as media literacy is sometimes assumed to be a natural competency developed through constant media use rather than a set of skills and understandings that should be actively taught (Jenkins 2009: 15; boyd 2014: 177), media-makers assume that ecological literacies can be imparted to children through mere exposure to environmental issues and problems. The news texts analysed in this chapter certainly conveyed knowledge about environmental issues and problems and offered their young audiences the pleasures of becoming more knowledgeable about issues of national or international significance. At times, though, these news texts— particularly those about climate activism—offered more than knowledge: they invited the audience to consider strategies for action and build a sense of personal efficacy, thus aligning with the definitions of environmental literacy put forward in Chap. 2, which emphasise participatory action, decision-making, and citizenship (see McBride et  al. 2013). Children’s news stories about climate activism, in particular, open a space for such literacies to be cultivated precisely because they depict—and address— children as social actors, and this in turn alters the perception of the imagined audience. Suddenly, ‘the child’ is not just a passive spectator or witness; ‘the child’ is now a participant and a change-maker, and an active part of the news narrative. Importantly, too, the three news programmes under scrutiny in this chapter differ from adult news programmes in a fundamental way: they are designed to be viewed in the classroom, and each news broadcast is often accompanied by ancillary materials to support teachers. Children’s news, therefore, exists at the intersection between the journalism industry and the education sector, and for this reason, too,

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children’s news texts are potential sites of environmental literacy-building, even if some of the work must be undertaken by educators. Finally, this chapter has shown that reporting on the environment for children is challenging. Environmental stories do not always have strong human protagonists; indeed, humans are often the ‘villain’ of the story, or at least part of the problem. Stories about the environment are also not easily resolved, and it may be difficult to reach a satisfying conclusion (or a happy ending) when telling a story about, for example, catastrophic global biodiversity decline. Matthews’ study of Newsround in 2007—fourteen years ago at the time of writing this book—indicates that in the past, journalists danced around these challenges by cherry-picking environmental stories that neatly fitted into narratives with clear moral patterns. Through his interviews with the producers of this programme, Matthews detected a “professional simplification of the environment” (2007: 432) and argued that “news workers willingly conceive of issues in terms of simple moral questions and structure the news story about the environment matters accordingly” (2007: 433), in a way that ultimately “limit[s] the audience’s access to information, knowledge and debate about environmental degradation as well as other serious issues” (2007: 442). However, the analysis in this chapter—a textual analysis rather than a production-­studies approach, but one which encompassed Newsround as well as two other children’s news programmes—found that the challenges of news reporting on the environment for children are met in often productive ways by news-makers, even though simplification is occasionally part of the strategy. Using these findings, I propose that particular conventions of children’s storytelling—such as the acceptability of animals as protagonists, the notion of nature as a ‘place’ that can be routinely accessed and should be protected, the notion of children as ‘heroes’, and the valuing of a child’s voice—allow some of these challenges to be overcome, at times even enabling a radical intervention in adult ways of narrating the problem and a destabilising of adult authority through the awakening of a child’s perspective on global environmental events.

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CHAPTER 4

From Knowledge to Efficacy: The Greening of Children’s Television

As the previous chapters demonstrated, media can address children as environmentally literate audiences and also contribute to the development of young people’s environmental literacies. Chapter 3 also confirmed the argument introduced in Chap. 1: that media made with the intention of informing or entertaining young people—such as children’s news—often incorporates environmental content because it is perceived that ‘the environment’ is a key theme of interest for the young audience. I will now consider whether this perception of a child/nature connection also informs the production of children’s texts within the media industry often considered “most resistant to green ideas” (Parham 2016: 67): television. This chapter will investigate the role children’s television plays (or might play) in the communication and construction of environmental issues and problems, looking particularly at the building of knowledge and a sense of personal efficacy through the depiction of pro-environmental behaviour. The chapter also explores how adult conceptualisations of the ‘curious child’ inform the production of children’s environmental television. This adult belief that children are (or should be) curious about nature, and that young people take pleasure in invitations to join what Plevin has called “a world of environmental stewardship” (2004: 181), opens up avenues for the encoding of environmental themes into various genres of children’s television. However, as I will demonstrate below, the ‘curious child’ construct can also be constraining for the audience it addresses and for the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hawley, Environmental Communication for Children, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_4

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environmental issues it helps to depict, and when media-makers go beyond this image of childhood curiosity, a more productive construction of both child and environment can take place. This chapter defines ‘children’s television’ as texts (and related material) produced by the television industry for a child audience. Like the other types of media discussed in this book, then, children’s television is, uniquely, a type of media defined by its target audience, specifically by the age of its target audience. We can also define children’s television as a type of television made by adults for audiences who are not adults. Children have very little to do with the production of children’s television, and this results in a gap between those who make children’s television and those who watch it. A similar gap between adult writer and child reader is identified by Jacqueline Rose in her discussion of children’s literature. Rose writes: Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between… There is, in one sense, no body of literature which rests so openly on an acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee. (1984: 1–2)

We glimpsed such a gap in the previous chapter: children’s news, too, is largely created by adults for children. This gap between producers and consumers allows children’s television (like news) to become a space in which constructions of childhood take place, as adult media-makers imagine their target audience and write these imaginings into the text (Buckingham 1995: 47). As Anna Potter notes, moreover, children’s television derives its distinctiveness not only from the imagined child audience but also from the many functions that the programmes are perceived (by adults) to have in relation to this audience, including “the education and socialization of children, the protection of children from unsuitable content and the allaying of adult fears about television’s possible ill effects on children” (2015: 3). To a certain extent, then, an image of the innocent child informs the production, distribution, and regulation of children’s television, and I am concerned in this chapter with how such imagining of childhood informs the on-screen depiction of human behaviour towards the more-than-human world. Before continuing with this chapter’s analyses, two important points must be made. Firstly, building on the ideas raised in Chap. 3 about simplification and transformation, this chapter does not assume that children’s

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television is a watered-down, stripped back, sweetened, or simplified version of adult television. It recognises, for example, that the complex storylines that define adult television drama (Mittell 2015) are also present in children’s programmes such as Adventure Time and Avatar: The Last Airbender. But it also recognises that perhaps more so than any of the other media types considered in this book, with the possible exception of videogames, television has been framed in public discourse as an unhealthy or damaging force in children’s lives. Brooker discusses the stubbornness of the “public presentation of television as bad for children” (2012: 2), and while this notion is embedded in broader traditions of public discourse in which television, as a popular medium, is seen to be commercialised and crass (Lotz and Gray 2012: 7), it is also specific to the perceived vulnerabilities of the child audience. As noted in Chap. 2, moreover, television in particular is called out as a culprit by Richard Louv (2010) in his discussion of the nature deficit disorder. Even more so than other types of media, television is perceived as a sedentary, indoor activity that cannot incorporate any engagement with the outdoor, natural world; it is also a space populated by characters and narratives from huge media franchises, a commercialised space where children will encounter advertisements for endless plastic toys and other branded products, or will otherwise be positioned within commercial markets (Hill 2011; Kapur 2005; McAllister and Giglio 2005). It is perhaps for this reason—this lingering perception that television cannot be a force for good in children’s lives—that there has, as yet, been little scholarly investigation of the relationship between children’s television and environmental communication. Secondly, children’s television viewing today must be understood in the context of the entanglement between television and digital media. Recent studies show that children continue to consume screen media of all kinds—including television programmes alongside films and online content—but they are using multiple devices to do so, including tablets, mobile phones, and computers in addition to the traditional television set (ACMA 2017: 16–17). Increasingly, too, video-sharing platforms and apps are used by children to access screen content; these include YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and Twitch. Use of video-sharing platforms and apps has steadily increased over the past decade with a particularly sharp increase during the COVID-19 pandemic—in the UK, for example, it was found that in 2020 children’s use of video-sharing platforms was “nearly universal” at 97% (Ofcom 2021: 13). This is significant because, as we will see in Chap. 7, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are also a source of

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environmental content created by and for young people. Children’s consumption of texts produced by the television industry is therefore part of a far more diverse media diet than previous generations experienced, and children are viewing industry-produced content alongside that created by citizen media-makers.

‘A Tough Nut to Crack?’ Television and Environmental Communication Prior studies of television and environmental communication have revealed that the television industry has typically approached environmentalism and environmental themes with, as Parham notes, “neglect, marginalisation, and belittlement”, due to television’s entrenchment in “capitalist” ideologies (2016: 67–69). In a particularly famous study examining content patterns in US television in the 1990s, Shanahan and co-authors found that television viewing cultivated “environmental apathy, and perhaps even antipathy” due to a lack of attention paid to environmental messages “combined with a positive commitment to a consumerist worldview, which results in a ‘discouragement’ of environmentalism” (1997: 312). Arguably, this is changing in the twenty-first century, due to the mainstreaming of environmentalism itself as well as the growing urgency of the environmental crisis and the amount of media attention it receives. Dahlstrom and Scheufele, in a study based on data collected in 2002, identified a “significant association between television exposure and concern for environmental risks” (2010: 62), as well as a correlation between diversity of exposure and awareness of environmental problems (in adults). Their findings suggest that television consumption does impact perceptions of the environment, but in a positive way, and that the consumer who seeks out diverse television content will develop a stronger or more activated sense of environmental problems. This is an interesting complication of George Gerbner’s “mean world syndrome” (1998), a framework within which long-term television consumption was seen to cultivate a heightened sense of risk and a pessimistic worldview. The findings of Dahlstrom and Scheufele suggest that rather than a ‘gloomy’ outlook or sense of anxiety cultivated over time, critical thinking skills may be developed through diverse, long-term television consumption, and these critical thinking skills may enable a more productive response to the environmental crisis. Importantly, too, industry shifts that have seen the

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emergence of streaming and post-broadcast television have also opened new avenues for the representation of environmental themes. Pat Brereton argues that streaming itself “might suggest modes of presenting and even critiquing long established environmental discourses” (2018: 131–132). With reference to the adult drama series Breaking Bad and its spin-off Better Call Saul, Brereton explores how themes of environmental sensitivity and frugality are performed in popular culture texts distributed on streaming platforms. The images and narratives of such texts, he proposes, afford new ways “to engage with a growing range of environmental dilemmas, as citizens face global insecurity in the modern world” (2018: 146). In this sense, television may be less “resistant to green ideas” (Parham 2016: 67) than it once was, as TV content diversifies and as environmental concerns become more pervasive throughout culture. There is also a growing sense of the responsibility of television production teams to contribute in some way to the process of mitigating environmental problems—or at least making them visible. For example, research conducted by BAFTA Albert (2019) identified insufficiencies in the BBC’s coverage of environmental issues in television drama. Through an analysis of the subtitles of BBC television programmes, it was found that terms relating to climate or the environment are mentioned on television as rarely as words like “zombie”, “urine”, and “rhubarb” (BAFTA Albert 2019: 2). Interestingly, the report highlights the duty of the television industry to “talk about” climate change across all genres and emphasises the role that media texts and production cultures can play in tackling climate change, particularly by telling “urgent, optimistic, solution-based, accessible, authentic, sustainability stories” and “imagining a sustainable society” (BAFTA Albert 2019: 2). In response to the report, BAFTA chairwoman Dame Pippa Harris announced that “[t]he TV industry’s call to address climate change is clear. It’s time to write a different script” (quoted in Foster and Lukov 2019). In the same news story in which Harris was quoted, Charlie Brooker, the showrunner of science fiction anthology series Black Mirror (which often incorporates environmental themes), described the integration of climate change into television plot lines as a “very, very tough nut to crack” (quoted in Foster and Lukov 2019). Indeed, as noted in Chap. 3, climate change is a challenging story to tell because it lacks a clear protagonist and a clear resolution, and is often difficult to visualise, making it a particularly daunting topic for content creators in the screen industries.

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But if climate change is a “tough nut to crack” for adults, is it even tougher for children? Or are there existing avenues within the conventions of children’s television along which environmental messages can easily travel? Children’s fictional television programmes are filled with narratives about goodness conquering greed and plucky child protagonists who stand up to powerful adult authority figures. The characters who inhabit children’s television, moreover, are not always human: a recent study of children’s television in Canada and the US found that just under half the characters were human, one-third were animals, and the rest were a mix of mechanical or mythical creatures and even other objects such as plants (Lemish and Johnson 2019: 11). Using a non-human character activates a different perspective on environmental problems, or at the very least, the prevalence of non-human characters in children’s television might destabilise anthropocentric worldviews. Factual programming, meanwhile, is often guided by the need to educate young audiences about the world around them and to use engaging narratives and visuals as tools for communication on important issues. Does all of this lead to more opportunities for storytelling about climate change and related environmental problems? To answer these questions, we must carefully consider both the narrative patterns and the industry imperatives that define children’s television. It might be assumed that climate change, specifically, and environmental problems more broadly are avoided in children’s television due to concerns about the complex or disturbing nature of these topics. In a 2017 article for Slate, journalist Melinda Moyer found that children’s television is “ignoring” climate change (Moyer 2017), and in the same year, the organisation Kidscreen expressed concerns that television programmes were “sheltering” children from climate change (Whyte 2017). As we will see in chapters ahead, though, the rise of youth-led climate activism is imprinting on children’s media by dismantling conservative notions about the inappropriateness of climate change as a topic of children’s interest. It has even been suggested that because so much of children’s television is animated and therefore takes longer to produce, we are only now seeing the emergence of the work of young content creators who were inspired by the climate strikes of 2018 and 2019 (Benchetrit 2021). More broadly, Gauntlett has written about the normalising of ecological messages and “green concerns” in children’s and family television programmes (2005: 68), while Keliher found that television can raise children’s awareness of environmental problems: the six- and seven-year-­ old children in Keliher’s study “had a well developed sense of ‘nature as a

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threatened place’” due to the “high profile given to environmental issues by television programmes” (1997: 242). Today, broadcasters are “actively looking for eco-conscious content” for young audiences, and makers of children’s television are more willing to attempt to strike the “tricky” balance between entertainment and education when dealing with complex environmental problems like climate change (Dickson 2020). Contemporary young audiences in the Anglophone West, therefore, have access to a plethora of green-themed television programmes. The Australian children’s series dirtgirlworld, for example, celebrates “sustainable silliness” (McQuillen and Eustace 2010) through music, larrikinism, and a vibrant animation style (see Hawley 2018), while the British educational programme EcoMaths demonstrates how mathematics can contribute to the creation of a sustainable future. Climate change is tackled alongside fart jokes in the Canadian animated series Big Blue, while topics such as deforestation, alternative energy, ocean garbage, endangered animals, oil spills, and littering are covered in a variety of children’s science-­ themed programmes from Dora the Explorer to Doc McStuffins (Moyer 2017). As I observed in Chap. 1, even children’s television programmes without overt environmental themes are using set design or promotional paratexts to articulate concern for the environment, to highlight environmental problems, or to normalise sustainability practices. The normalising of environmental messages in children’s television extends back to the postwar period in Britain and America, when children’s popular culture absorbed a new narrative: that of the child protector fighting those who sought to destroy or harm the more-than-human world. As Coward has pointed out, such narratives, whether in fictional or non-fictional texts, played upon “the child’s right to be not only represented but powerful within the family” (1990: 41) largely by pressuring adults to make different consumer choices. These cultural narratives intensified during the 1990s, a significant period in the history of climate change science and climate policy (containing the first two reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, and the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol). During this time, the American animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers, broadcast from 1990 to 1992, established the now-familiar narrative of children fighting to save the world from ecological harm, led by the figure of the “eco superhero” (Bell 2014: 37). Captain Planet depicted young people as active in the prevention of environmental crimes such as pollution and habitat destruction, although

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it is also demonstrable of the extent to which environmental themes became, as Bell puts it, “a marketable property in the consumer cultures of children’s media” (2014: 43). More bluntly, King accuses Captain Planet of “selling environmentalism to kids” (1994: 108) and notes that the environmental crisis theme became pervasive in children’s culture during the 1990s. “On t-shirts and diapers”, she writes, “animal crackers and Burger King bags, in classrooms and on cartoons, a persistent call for children to ‘save the planet’ has been embraced and promoted within every arena of child life” (King 1994: 104). In this sense, programmes like Captain Planet capitalised on and commodified a growing environmental awareness in young children as much, or more, as they helped to create it. Elsewhere, environmental themes have been encoded into children’s television programmes, particularly those that fall within the “edutainment” genre, which Buckingham and Scanlon define as “a hybrid mix of education and entertainment that relies heavily on visual material, on narrative or game-like formats, and on more informal, less didactic styles of address” (2001: 282). In the 1990s, for example, the long-running British children’s television programme Blue Peter—which awards children badges of various colours to celebrate achievements—established a “green badge” for environmental contributions. From 2016, the green badge has been made from recycled materials, and in 2021 the programme launched a “super green badge” which children can earn by taking a two-week pledge to undertake sustainability practices, inviting children to become a “green army” and take on the role of “climate hero” (BBC 2021). The American educational programme Sesame Street, meanwhile, has long engaged with environmental issues, with characters like Oscar the Grouch and Kermit the Frog used as springboards to explore topics such as waste management and wetlands preservation, respectively (Higgins 2015). In 2009, two years after the fourth IPCC report, Sesame Workshop launched an initiative called “My World is Green and Growing” which involved an influx of green-themed content, including a guest appearance by then-first lady Michelle Obama teaching children about the benefits of growing a vegetable garden. More recently, in 2021, Sesame Workshop announced “an array of collaborations” to help children and their families celebrate Earth Day, including a number of books, a full-length video special featuring actor Paul Rudd as “Mr Earth”, and a “nature-themed playlist” on the Sesame Street YouTube channel (Sesame Workshop 2021a). In Australia, similarly, the long-running programme Play School promotes recycling, gardening, and care for the outdoors, receiving intergenerational respect

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for its “anti-consumerist message” (Hill 2009: 75) and for the way it is “subversive to the consumerist culture that influences many current children’s television shows” (Hill 2009: 69–70). In 2021, the producers of Play School announced the release of a “Green Team” series which “shares important messages and ideas to encourage our youngest citizens to look after planet earth”, aligning closely with developments in education for sustainability (ABC Television 2021). In each of these texts (and their promotional paratexts), we find an image of the ‘green child’: the child as citizen of a world in ecological peril who plays a vital role in restoring the balance between humanity and nature. We also find a normalising of sustainability practices as part of childhood. The encoding of green themes into children’s television programmes demonstrates the potential—or, at least, a recognition of the potential— for television to be a site of environmental learning rather than just a force that drags children away from nature. To a certain extent, the greening of children’s television has been informed by developments in environmental education, including the recognition that the early years of childhood are a time in which pro-environmental values can be established (Samuelsson and Kaga 2008; Elliott and Davis 2009: 67), and the shift towards education for, not just about, the natural world. Education for the environment involves the development of values, skills, and competencies as well knowledge, with the goal of equipping learners to participate in decision-making and act on environment-related issues (Davis 2015: 18). Environmental educators today teach students not just to understand the natural world but “to be part of the world as engaged citizens, [and] advocates for social and ecological justice” (Winograd 2016: 3). Programmes like Sesame Street can be described as cultivating education “for” the environment because they move beyond a perception of an “information deficit” or “knowledge deficit” (Simis et al. 2016; Kellstedt et al. 2008) and depict pro-environmental action, participation, and care; and while the eco-­ superhero figure (embodied by Captain Planet) may well be a commodification of the environmental movement, it too plays a role in normalising the idea that individuals and communities should act in ways that are “for” the environment—that knowledge without action is not enough. The educational potential of children’s environmental television has received little academic attention, just as children’s television itself has rarely been studied as a type of ‘environmental communication’. Arguably, the belief that children’s programmes can do little more than commodify environmentalism is a barrier to exploring the full potential of television to

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communicate productively on (or ‘for’) the environment. However, the possibility that programmes such as Sesame Street or even Captain Planet might contribute to children’s environmental learning aligns with research into the educational aspects of children’s television. It has been recognised that television can function as an advanced social partner “scaffolding children’s developing abilities and facilitating learning” (Richert et al. 2011: 82). Shalom Fisch proposes that television can serve as “informal education” (2003: 9) and might provide “a window to new experiences, enrich academic knowledge, enhance attitudes and motivation, and nurture social skills” (2003: 1). However, Fisch notes that because informal education must compete with other outside-the-classroom activities to gain children’s attention and engagement, it must be “highly appealing” to children (2003: 9), and “humour” as well as “visual action” contributes to this appeal (2003: 31). Importantly, Richert and co-authors point out that young children are more likely to learn from a television programme if they have developed a relationship or emotional connection with an on-­ screen character (2011: 91), and that the establishing of parasocial relations between character and child viewer can facilitate learning (2011: 92). With this in mind, I will now turn to a series of case studies in which character traits, on-screen behaviour, and the child/character connection are used as textual strategies to activate environmental learning in children’s television programmes.

Environmental Virtue and Vice Let us first consider The Octonauts, a British animated children’s television series produced by Silvergate Media, broadcast on the BBC’s children’s channel CBeebies, and adapting the picture books by Vicki Wong and Michael C. Murphy. In eleven-minute episodes running over four seasons produced from 2010 to 2015, The Octonauts tells the story of eight anthropomorphised animals who study and care for marine creatures and environments while living in their underwater base, the Octopod. The narratives are driven by the actions of different characters, most notably the leader Barnacles the Polar Bear, the adventurous Kwazii Kitten, and the timid Peso Penguin. Invariably, the Octonauts must rescue, heal, or protect other sea creatures, enabling young audiences to learn about the habitats, characteristics, behaviours, and needs of various marine animals. The series sometimes (but not always) engages in pro-environmental messaging, with particular episodes engaging directly with problems relating

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to the threatened, degraded, or despoiled nature of marine environments. One such episode is “The Octonauts and the Pelicans”, in which the issue of marine debris erupts into the narrative when a group of injured pelicans is brought aboard the Octopod. The pelicans are distressed and groaning in pain. “We found them covered in rubbish”, Barnacles tells Peso, who is the team’s medical expert. The incident is treated as a medical emergency and dramatic music plays as the pelicans are transferred onto makeshift hospital beds. Images of the pelicans with plastic bottles caught on their beaks or six-pack rings wrapped around their legs replicate photographs children may have seen of real-world seabirds injured or killed by plastic waste. Here, waste is depicted as something that hurts animals— the emphasis is on injury and healing, as with many other Octonauts episodes (hence the centrality of Peso’s character, a medic). Peso removes the items and the pelicans show appreciation by murmuring happily and flapping their wings. Kwazii then models pro-environmental behaviour by inquiring more deeply into the problem. “Were you attacked by some kind of rubbish monster?” he asks. The pelicans immediately tell their story, noting that “tis a tale that needs to be told”. We see flashbacks of the pelicans gracefully diving in search of fish only to be surrounded by rubbish—“a big bunch of grimy sea junk”, as one pelican describes it. The learned characters of the group, Professor Inkling and Doctor Shellington, go on to explain the problem of marine debris and floating garbage patches, upon which the Octonauts decide their mission is to “clean it up”. Encountering a garbage patch, the Octonauts scoop up the rubbish in nets, aided by the pelicans. Dashi the Dog asks, “what do we do with the rubbish once we scoop it up?” (identifying a key issue in real-world attempts to tackle this problem) upon which it is decided that the rubbish will be placed in a floating bin and taken away for recycling: a swift removal of the problem that arguably does not count as a fully-fledged solution—it is notable that unlike the clean-up, the recycling process itself is not actually visualised on-screen. Here, an environmental problem is solved through collaboration, innovation, and hard work. A similar narrative pattern guides episodes that deal with fragile or threatened marine ecosystems, including giant kelp forests (series 3, episode 18, 2014) and the Great Barrier Reef (special episode 11, 2020). The Octonauts is aimed at very young children, and it is likely for this reason that while the threat to marine ecosystems depicted in this episode is anthropogenic, humans themselves are not identified as the cause of the

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problem or made present in the episode at all—in this way, the threats and problems are detached from their human causes. In programmes targeting slightly older audiences, certain characters embody the human actions that cause environmental problems. One such programme is Wild Kratts, an American animated series telling the story of two zoologist brothers, Chris and Martin Kratt (the real-life creators of the show). In each twenty-five-­ minute episode, broadcast on PBS and the Cartoon Network in the US with an inscribed audience of six to eight-year-olds (PBS n.d.), the Kratt brothers and their friends explore areas of wild nature and care for animals and their habitats. Animal traits are depicted as “creature powers” and, through scientific innovation, the human characters use these powers to enhance their own abilities, modelling respect for the zoological world combined with a madcap inventiveness typical of children’s adventure stories. In most episodes, human villains seek to hunt, capture, harm, or destroy animals or their habitats: these villains include Zach Varmitech, an inventor who seeks to control and enslave animals for his own purposes; Gaston Gourmand, a disgraced chef who poaches endangered animals for use in cooking; and Donita Donata, a fashion designer who uses and sells animals for clothing or accessory items. Between them, the protagonists and villains model attitudes towards non-human animals that emphasise intrinsic and instrumental value, respectively: the heroes respect the intrinsic value of wild creatures (while occasionally using the “creature powers” to help them out of a tight spot) and the villains see animals only as objects to use or resources to be tapped. The protagonists also facilitate a closer bond between viewer and animal by naming the creatures, identifying their special features, and responding to them with affection and/or respect. For example, the episode “A Huge Orange Problem”, set in the rainforests of Borneo, introduces the audience to orangutans, who, we are told early in the episode, are close to extinction and in dire need of protection. The Kratt brothers act as cultural intermediaries, sharing their knowledge with the young audience, but they also exhibit curiosity and a desire to learn from the animals: they defer to the wisdom of a large male orangutan who shows them the “medicine of the forest” to help them heal their friends, and watch carefully as a mother orangutan teaches her baby “the knowledge of the forest”. In contrast the villain, Zach, is greedy and seeks to cut down rainforest trees to satisfy his desire for a table made of black wood, embodying the problem of deforestation. When the Kratt brothers confront Zach and implore him to curb his destructive impulses, he is

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unmoved by the plight of the animals whose habitat he is destroying. The brothers become more-than-human when they absorb the orangutans’ “creature powers”, crush Zach’s army of robots, and stop the deforestation. The villain, meanwhile, is powerless in the face of these animal-­ enhanced humans and also ignorant: “I didn’t know you lived here”, Zach says pitifully to one of the orangutans when confronted with its presence. This depiction of deforestation as an act of villainy or greed makes the problem visible, but arguably does not give children an adequate insight into the problem and its potential real-world solutions. In contrast, some of the children’s news programmes analysed in the previous chapter were able to explain that deforestation is largely caused by agriculture which is often crucial to the livelihood of local workers in developing nations, many of whom live below the poverty line, and that solutions must therefore be developed in consultation with local communities (see, e.g., ‘Conservationist Works to Protect the Sierra Gorda Region’, CNN 10, 11 February 2021). In this sense, the simplistic narrative of Wild Kratts does not create space for a multifaceted exploration of environmental problems. Arguably, too, this episode’s depiction of deforestation is a missed opportunity to outline the role forests play in mitigating climate change. In this way, both Wild Kratts and The Octonauts tend to represent environmental problems in a singular or even ‘siloed’ manner—one problem per episode—which occludes opportunities to explore the interconnections between such problems. However, these programmes do depict pro-environmental behaviours and frame them in an appealing way for child audiences. The Octonauts’ mantra of “explore, rescue, protect” implies a relationship with the natural world that is defined by inquiry and care, and while the Octonauts themselves are animals, they are also anthropomorphised enough to model for children an ideal human relationship with the marine world. In Wild Kratts, meanwhile, the care and attentiveness paid by the heroes to the natural world are shown to be rewarding and important components of the heroes’ safe, meaningful, and happy lives. Both programmes articulate important messages about the limits of who can be a social actor in relation to the environment: in both cases, an active engagement with environmental problems is shown to be an everyday affair that does not require special expertise or authority; rather, it stems from a sense of care and is therefore accessible to everyone and anyone. In both The Octonauts and Wild Kratts, moreover, pro-environmental behaviour often occurs as a result of peer example—one character showing or teaching others how to

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act—and it sometimes occurs as a result of team or networked action (characters working together to solve an environmental problem). While knowledge is imparted in each programme, active problem-solving is shown to be an equally important element of the human/environment relationship. Given that children are thought to learn from on-screen characters when parasocial relationships are activated, as noted above, it is significant that pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours are depicted in children’s television programmes primarily through character traits. In particular, the two case studies under investigation here, The Octonauts and Wild Kratts, tend to depict environmental behaviour in terms of virtue and vice. There are resonances here with Sandler’s work on environmental virtue ethics (2013). Sandler identifies a series of environmental virtues—such as care of living things, appreciation of natural beauty, moderation in use of natural resources, compassion towards animals, and temperance regarding material goods—and their corresponding vices: insensitivity to natural beauty, hubris regarding our ability to control the environment, apathy regarding environmental issues, and intemperance in consumptive practices. In Wild Kratts, in particular, we find that the heroes embody these environmental virtues while the villains embody and perform the vices. A similar depiction of character traits can be found in earlier programmes such as The Smoggies (1988–1991), an animated French-Canadian series in which the eponymous Smoggies pollute the ocean paradise of the virtuous Suntots, exhibiting greed, selfishness, and—in particular—a lack of moderation in the use of resources drawn from nature. The Smoggies is interesting because the pro-environmental behaviours it depicts are aligned with the childlike characters, the Suntots, who look and act like small children, while the environmental ‘sins’ are carried out by adults. This allows each episode to riff on the theme of environmentally aware children standing up to adults who hold very different values. This is less noticeable in Wild Kratts, where both the heroes and the villains are, seemingly, adults. However, the Kratt brothers and their friends exhibit childlike qualities— humility, playfulness, friendship, and a predilection for having fun in nature. In this way, childhood is at least partially aligned with environmentally virtuous behaviour. The virtues (and corresponding vices) depicted in these programmes resonate, for the most part, with the thinking of early environmentalists. For example, Rachel Carson’s notion of wonder and love—an environmental attitude that can lead to pro-environmental behaviour—is easily

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depicted in children’s television programmes, where the protagonists often love, care for, and/or express awe, wonder, and curiosity towards non-human nature. However, our environmental challenges are more complex now than they were in Carson’s time. As Sandler notes: The wilderness and land-use issues that dominated early environmentalism are still prominent… as are the pollution issues that first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s… [but] To these have been added global issues, such as climate change, ozone depletion, and population growth, which are impersonal, distant (both spatially and temporally), collective action problems that involve the cumulative unintended effects of an enormous number of seemingly inconsequential decisions, as well as issues associated with advanced technologies such as genetic modification and nanobiotechnology. (2013)

He goes on to argue that environmental virtue ethics provide a diverse and dynamic set of evaluative concepts that can deal with such a wide range of problems (2013). However, these complexities are not fully captured in either The Octonauts (where vices are rarely depicted) or Wild Kratts, or in earlier programmes such as The Smoggies or Captain Planet. Instead, a simplistic relationship between attitude and behaviour is depicted in these texts, where, for example, environmental vices are the pathway to villainy and, at the same time, villainy leads naturally to environmental vices, without hope for character reform. Consequently, ideas about vice and virtue are imposed on young audiences in these programmes, often without space for further inquiry. In this sense, while children’s television programmes can use character traits to normalise pro-environmental behaviour, there are limits to the capacity of such programmes to delve into the complexities of pro-­ environmental behaviour or to invite critical thinking about why such behaviour is ‘good’ or ‘important’. We can attribute this to perceptions of the limited capacity, in turn, of young audiences to understand environmental behaviour as anything more than helpful or harmful. Research has shown that children are often taught to adopt pro-environmental behaviours in a way that does not promote deep understanding of how these behaviours influence the environment, but that children are nevertheless capable of such understanding. In their work with five- and six-year-olds, for example, Kos and co-authors (2016) found that children were able to identify improper behaviour towards the environment and knew how to

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perform pro-environmental actions, without necessarily understanding how these actions were impacting the environment. These authors found that children often engage in pro-environmental behaviour because it is “socially desirable” (2016: 5561). However, their experiments also showed that children in this age group are capable of understanding the impacts of their behaviour on the environment if given the tools and guidance to do so. Similarly, Hartley and co-authors (2015) found that children aged eight to thirteen were able to extend and deepen their knowledge about marine litter and its relationship to human behaviour after an educational intervention. While the children in their study were slightly older than the target audiences of The Octonauts and Wild Kratts, what is made clear here is that children’s levels of intellectual engagement with pro-­ environmental behaviour can be constrained by adult (mis)conceptions of their cognitive abilities: children may not understand the relationship between behaviour and environmental impact because adults believe they do not understand it and therefore do not support them to do so. Similarly, children’s television programmes may invite a limited engagement with environmental themes if media-makers are guided by perceptions that young audiences cannot or do not want to delve deeply into such thematics. It is possible, however, for a children’s television programme to be more playful when depicting environmental behaviours and to explore their entanglement with social identities and practices. An example of this, and an interesting subversion of green narratives, can be found in the animated series We Bare Bears, which is aimed at slightly older children— online children’s media reviewer Common Sense Media recommends it for ages eight and over—but which nevertheless is likely to be popular with quite young audiences as an animated, humorous programme about three bears (complete with its own line of toys and ancillary merchandise). Created by American animator Daniel Chong and broadcast on the Cartoon Network in the US between 2015 and 2019, We Bare Bears is not an overtly environmental programme, but it does explore the human/ animal/nature relationship along with a range of concerns and anxieties linked to the ‘millennial’ generation, including, at times, the challenges involved in adopting environmental identities and the complexities involved in discerning what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ environmental behaviour looks like. The episode “Tote Life”, for example, involves the three bears—Grizz, Panda, and Ice Bear—navigating social norms around reusable shopping bags, and draws much of its humour from the disruption of these norms. The episode begins when the bears are shamed by a shop

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assistant for using plastic bags and pressured to buy a reusable tote bag. The vice/virtue binary is activated here, with the virtuous act of buying the tote helping the bears redeem themselves after environmentally ‘bad’ behaviour. However, the episode does not end by identifying a virtue. The bears soon find that the tote bags unlock social privileges, including free ice creams and kindness from strangeness. They are delighted: “This was our key to fitting in”, Grizz exclaims, and Panda confesses “I finally feel like I’m part of something”. The episode flips environmental vices and virtues, or confuses them, countering the idea that virtues may be activated easily by particular green objects, and demonstrating that pro-­ environmental behaviour is entangled with (and complicated by) social and cultural norms. Enraptured by the “new level of eco-coolness” (as Grizz puts it) that the bags allow them to ascend to, the bears buy hundreds of totes, creating mountains of waste in their cave. “You guys got it all wrong and twisted—this is not the tote life”, the same shop assistant chides them when he sees them with multiple bags. Rather than simply imparting information about what good and bad environmental behaviour looks like, this episode exposes the way young people might be pressured to adopt a pro-environmental identity without critical thinking—in the end, it is the imaginative thinking displayed by the bears, when they use their excess bags to help local beavers build a dam, that the episode displays in a positive light. The “Tote Life” episode of We Bare Bears shows how television programmes for children might depict the complexities of the relationship between individual behaviour and green cultures—although it is important to note here that, unlike The Octonauts, Wild Kratts, or, especially, Sesame Street, We Bare Bears is not made with an educational intent. This position outside the ‘edutainment’ genre perhaps gives the creators more freedom to be playful around environmental issues: because, for all that children’s programmes like The Octonauts and Wild Kratts outwardly display aspects of play (seen particularly in the cuteness, silliness, or fun-­ loving nature of the characters) they tend to treat environmental issues with great seriousness, and this can lead to rigidity in the depiction of pro-environmental behaviour patterns.

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(De)constructing the Curious Child Thus far, this chapter has explored the potential of children’s television programmes to communicate on, about, and for the environment. However, it is equally important to examine the construction of childhood at work in such texts—and to consider how this construction of childhood, in turn, impacts the production of textual meaning in relation to the environment. Often, children’s environmental television is made with a ‘curious child’ in mind: the child who seeks to explore the natural world; the child who asks questions about environmental problems. The construction of a curious child is particularly prevalent in environmental media texts for very young children. Thus, in their summary of children’s environmental television, the organisation Common Sense Media advises that “[f]or the littlest kids, an appreciation of the natural world through beautiful images and captivating animals plants the seeds of environmental awareness” (n.d.). A similar description of young viewers can be found in the learning resource that accompanied the release of Sesame Workshop’s 2009 “My World Is Green and Growing” initiative: Children are filled with curiosity about the world around them. Early experiences with nature will help tap into that curiosity… Find nature anywhere, whether peeking from a crack in the sidewalk or rustling in the wind. The more children learn to enjoy nature, the more likely they are to develop a sense of respect for the environment—and to care for it, too. (Sesame Workshop 2009)

Twelve years later, this sentiment was repeated by Sesame Workshop spokesperson Dr Jeanette Betancourt who, in a 2021 press release, stated that “[c]hildren are naturally curious… When we encourage children to ask lots of questions, we’re helping them build their curiosity and think like little scientists” (Sesame Workshop 2021b). The press release was promoting a set of resources designed to “foster children’s curiosity and a love of science”, including a video in which the characters Ernie and Elmo create art out of plastic bottles. Similarly, Head of Content at PBS Kids, Linda Simensky, announced in 2020 that she “wants to see well-developed characters who are curious about the world” in any science-based programme (Dickson 2020). Wild Kratts, which is broadcast on PBS in the US, is promoted to parents with the words:

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Animals can take you anywhere in science. This series now takes the natural appeal of animals and harnesses it towards the goal of teaching science concepts to children. (PBS n.d.)

The idea here is that the “natural appeal” of zoology can ‘unlock’ other aspects of science education for children, constructing the ideal viewer as a child with a ‘natural’ curiosity towards non-human animals. In many ways, the assumption that children are curious about nature, animals, and environmental issues has driven the greening of children’s television, often leading to the exploration of sustainability, biodiversity, and other ‘green’ topics from a childlike perspective. In this sense, the imagined ‘curious child’ activates new possibilities for storytelling and the production of meaning about the environment. However, there are important problems with the ‘curious child’ construct that must be identified. Firstly, the very notion of ‘curiosity’ implies that a child must ask questions of adult authority figures (scientists, experts, teachers, parents). This emphasises the division between child and adult, confirming the authoritative power of the adult. In this sense, curiosity can be interpreted as the act or position of being attentive to adult wisdom. Interestingly, in some of the examples analysed above, this relationship between curious child and knowledgeable adult is played out through character interaction, with characters slipping into these roles momentarily: in both The Octonauts and Wild Kratts, for instance, characters who are portrayed as being more juvenile ‘become’ the curious child and activate the authority of other characters; in The Octonauts, in particular, these are learned, scholarly figures (Professor Inkling and Doctor Shellington) who respond to questions asked by less knowledgeable and seemingly younger members of the team (such as Dashi Dog and Peso Penguin). In these depictions, curiosity is a positive character trait, but it is linked to both innocence and ignorance: the assumption here is that the child asks questions because they lack knowledge, and that this lack is itself a normal aspect of childhood. Certainly, the question-and-answer format is an important tool for engaging young audiences and imparting factual information to children. In the episode of The Octonauts analysed above, the questions asked by Dashi, Kwazii, and Peso lead to the provision of important information about marine pollution. However, this way of thinking aligns with the information deficit model, which, problematically, reduces communication to a transmission of information in order to fill a knowledge gap (Simis et al. 2016; Kellstedt et al. 2008). When an information deficit is

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assumed, the child viewer is positioned, primarily, as someone who needs or desires to overcome this deficiency, with the media-makers as experts speaking ‘through’ the knowledgeable characters to the curious child. This construction of the inscribed audience is also rooted in the assumption that curiosity is a natural quality rather than a learned skill, neglecting the competencies that might be fostered to enable curiosity (such as inquiry, critical thinking, observation, and experimentation). Curiosity here becomes a virtue in itself, and a child who is not curious about nature or the environment falls outside the realm of ‘good’ or ‘desirable’ childhood. The second problem with the ‘curious child’ construct is that it is arguably deployed to protect or safeguard the boundaries of childhood itself. The curious child is not a knowing child—in this way, adult thinking structures the relationship between children and the environment in a way that upholds the myth of childhood innocence and maintains a non-­ threatening position for children to occupy while recognising that young people need to know the uncomfortable truths about environmental problems. In particular, the curious child construct protects the boundaries of childhood from incursion by ‘angry and rebellious youth’, embodied by some of the young activists who will be investigated and analysed in Chap. 7. These young activists, epitomised by Greta Thunberg, rarely display curiosity as a character trait, and indeed, it is their knowledge (of climate change, of media, and of their rights to intergenerational justice) that defines them as social actors in this sphere—and renders them threatening to adults. Cognisant of the gap between the inscribed viewer of environmental television and the young activists speaking out about climate change, we might ask: at what point does the curious child become the enraged or savvy youth? To this extent, the adult understanding of childhood that guides the production of what we might call ‘environmental edutainment’ is both enabling and limiting: while trying to activate a childlike perspective, adult media-makers may well unleash new perspectives on environmental problems, but when a curious child viewer is imagined, some pathways to effective environmental communication may be closed down. It is interesting, then, to observe how the makers of children’s television sometimes attempt to overcome the limits of the curious child construct even while encoding curiosity into the text as an environmental virtue. Wild Kratts provides us with an example here. While curiosity is certainly one of the virtues displayed within the text, the show’s paratexts

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are used to construct a child audience who is more than curious. On the Wild Kratts website and across social media platforms, fans of the show are described as “Creature Heroes” and invited to participate in fundraising initiatives (including bake sales and fun runs). In honour of their fans, the programme’s creators, Chris and Martin Kratt, established the Creature Hero Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that raises funds for animal protection. The foundation is described as: a new opportunity for you to join a team of fellow creature adventurers and help the amazing animals you love! We believe that we all have the ability to make a real, tangible difference for wildlife across the world and we want to empower you and people of all ages to do just that! (Wild Kratts n.d.)

When the young audience are hailed as ‘fans’ rather than simply ‘viewers’, the emphasis shifts from curiosity to care and participation. Importantly, too, Wild Kratts, as a purveyor of ‘informal’ learning about the environment, follows an inquiry-based approach, with characters modelling the practice of asking questions, observing, investigating, and solving problems—in other words, moving beyond the limits of curiosity.

Green Identities in Local Places The final example that I wish to explore in this chapter also moves beyond the limits of curiosity and breaks new ground by depicting children not as curious learners but as thought leaders and change-makers. It thus aligns with the great strides made by youth climate activists, who, as later chapters will demonstrate, have broken down traditional understandings of childhood and the child’s place in environmental conversations. Project Planet is a work of factual programming created by Sydney-based production company Emerald Films in 2018. The series focuses on teams of students from three Australian schools—Fremantle College in Western Australia, Taroona High School in Tasmania, and Berry Springs Primary School in the Northern Territory. With the help of guest experts, the students are tasked with leading their schools “into a more sustainable future” (Emerald Films n.d.), focusing on food waste, plastic waste, and water conservation, respectively. The programme draws from the conventions of reality television, lifestyle television, and the game show genre, and can be classified using Frances Bonner’s term “ordinary television” (2003), which encompasses real people and mundane or everyday activities—and while

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Bonner, in her book Ordinary Television, omits children’s programming due to its “special audience” and “particular regulatory protection” (2003: 4), we can certainly detect in Project Planet the influence of the texts she analyses, which revolve around ordinary people and everyday life. The action in Project Planet largely takes place on school grounds—a familiar setting to most young Australian viewers—and to emphasise their ordinariness, the children are mostly seen wearing their school uniforms. Alongside this celebration of ordinariness, the text’s emphasis is on creative thinking to tackle sustainability challenges, with each episode revolving around a concrete goal: for example, reducing the landfill produced by their class so that it fits into a glass jar. Interestingly, while Project Planet depicts sustainability in action, there is a deliberate avoidance of the word sustainability itself, which is described by the text’s creator as a “schoolified” term (Browning 2020). Rather than imposing adult conceptualisations and definitions of sustainability onto child viewers, the programme makes space for a child’s reading of sustainable behaviour. The actions of the young protagonists are foregrounded: for the most part, they are the central decision-makers and problem-solvers. Often, the children are shown as competent social actors in adult spaces: for example, the Fremantle College students are seen grocery shopping and walking through the city of Fremantle, searching for food without plastic packaging; one of the Berry Springs students is shown alone in the kitchen, making and packing her own lunch. Importantly, too, these real children were involved in the design of each episode and contributed to notable story moments. One episode, for example, features a ninja-like attack on the school staffroom by the Berry Springs students in search of poor waste management practices, leading to a depiction of children calling adults to account for their actions, and this particular scene was initiated by the child participants themselves (Browning 2020). The series focuses, too, on barriers to sustainability— most notably, the power relations that make it difficult for individuals or communities to initiate change, a barrier that is particularly applicable to children as social actors who are more likely to be disempowered than adults. The series draws its entertainment value from the narratives that unfold as the children grapple with such barriers and eventually overcome them. The power relation between children and adults is acknowledged through depictions of children ‘raiding’ the adult world: both literally— for example, in one episode the Taroona High School students raid the

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school’s recycling bins in search of material to make a flyer—and figuratively, with the children gathering scraps of adult knowledge in order to create, assemble, and execute their own plans. Rather than assuming that children lack knowledge about environmental problems and that this absence of knowledge can be filled by educationally-­oriented media, Project Planet provides viewers with the tools for constructing what Chawla (2009: 6) has called “an ecological or environmental identity, which forms when people identify with nature and consider caring for it an important aspect of their self-concept”. The pro-­ environmental behaviours depicted in the show are proffered as identity-­ building devices, part of the process of demarcating the young protagonists (and audiences who identify with them) from other children and from adults. The depiction of local environments plays a substantial role in this construction of an ecological identity. Indeed, just as environmental educators may seek to connect learners with a sense of place, promoting care for the environment through engagement with local landscapes, communities, and issues (Comber et al. 2007), media can promote environmental engagement through depictions of place—through a dual process of making the local environment visible and making environmental concerns local (Brereton 2018: 44). A sense of place is therefore vitally important to the green identities that Project Planet constructs, and in each episode, the children’s connection to their local environment drives their sustainability practices within the school; the school, meanwhile—as a place of learning and a place of action—is shown to be embedded in the local environment: and it is no coincidence that each school is connected to an iconic, beautiful, or locally significant setting. The loving depiction of the natural landscapes surrounding these three schools aids the text in establishing its theme of care for nature as an impetus for pro-environmental behaviour. Overall, children in Project Planet are depicted as local rather than global citizens. This occludes the possibility for representations of action (and activism) across national boundaries or outside school walls. The emphasis, too, is placed squarely on change at the individual or community level. Like the other television programmes under scrutiny in this chapter, Project Planet therefore imagines children to be quite separate from the mechanisms that drive systemic change, even though youth-led climate activism is showing that children can be drivers of such change and that pro-environmental behaviour can move far beyond sustainability practices to encompass protest and civic action. Nevertheless, the focus on

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green local citizenship in Project Planet invites the child viewer to consider themselves as ecologically active within a local space and to consider ‘the school’ not as an ecologically neutral institution but as a community embedded in and impactful on the natural environment. In this way, Project Planet resists any depiction of nature as something distant ‘out there’ and instead locates the child within the environmental politics and practices that surround the school. We can return here to environmental literacy, which, as argued in Chap. 2, involves the development of a sense of personal efficacy in the face of environmental problems. A television programme may promote just such a sense of efficacy in young audiences when it activates childlike thinking while also allowing children to step into seemingly adult modes of behaviour. This might involve not just the normalising of sustainability practices as part of children’s everyday lives, but the depiction of children as social actors, thought leaders, and change-makers in relation to environmental problems. It is imperative that we consider how changing perceptions of the child/nature relationship have impacted the children’s media industries, leading to developments such as that identified by the organisation Kidscreen—who, in a 2020 report, noted that children’s television outlets including CBC Kids, PBS KIDS, the ABC, and the BBC are seeking to tackle climate change more openly and develop a wider range of “age-­ appropriate environmentally themed shows” (Dickson 2020). Whether the ‘curious child’ construct will continue to drive such a proliferation of children’s environmental television remains to be seen. However, this chapter has demonstrated that an emphasis on aspects of environmental literacy other than knowledge—such as personal efficacy, problem-solving, identity, and connection to place—can allow the limitations of this construction to be overcome.

References ABC Television. 2021. Play School Early Education Notes—Series Green Team. Play School. Accessed November 12, 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/cm/ lb/13368768/data/play-­school-­green-­team-­notes-­data.pdf. ACMA. 2017. Children’s Television Viewing and Multi-screen Behaviour: Analysis of 2005–16 OzTAM Audience Data and 2017 Survey of Parents, Carers and Guardians. Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney: Australian Communications and Media Authority.

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BAFTA Albert. 2019. Subtitles to Save the World: Understanding How the Broadcasting Community is Covering Climate. London: British Academy of Film and Television Arts. BBC. 2021. Climate Heroes: Blue Peter Launches New Environment Challenge. Newsround, April 1. Accessed October 19, 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ newsround/56601717. Bell, Alice. 2014. What Shall We Tell the Children? In Culture and Climate Change: Narratives, ed. Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk, and Robert Butler, 37–44. Cambridge, UK: Shed. Benchetrit, Jenna. 2021. As Young People Brace for Climate Change, Kids TV is Going Green. CBC News, November 13. Accessed December 20, 2021. https://www.cbc.ca/news/enter tainment/kids-­t elevision-­g oing-­ green-­1.6246223. Bonner, Frances. 2003. Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: SAGE. Brereton, Pat. 2018. Environmental Literacy and New Digital Audiences. London and New York: Routledge. Brooker, Emily. 2012. Tune into Kids: How Children, Television Producers and Academics can Further Our Understanding of Children and Their Engagement with Television and the New Digital Technologies. Adelaide: ANZCA Conference. Browning, Sally. 2020. Interviewed by Erin Hawley. Melbourne, Australia, August 21. Buckingham, David. 1995. On the Impossibility of Children’s Television: The Case of Timmy Mallett. In In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences, ed. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, 47–61. London: British Film Institute. Buckingham, David, and Margaret Scanlon. 2001. Parental Pedagogies: An Analysis of British “edutainment” Magazines for Young Children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 1 (3): 281–299. Chawla, Louise. 2009. Growing up Green: Becoming an Agent of Care for the Natural World. The Journal of Developmental Processes 4 (1): 6–23. Comber, Barbara, Jo-Anne Reid, and Helen Nixon. 2007. Environmental Communications: Pedagogies of Responsibility and Place. In Literacies in Place: Teaching Environmental Communication, ed. Barbara Comber, Helen Nixon, and Jo-Anne Reid, 11–23. Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association. Common Sense Media. n.d. Environmental TV Shows. Accessed November 14, 2021. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/environmental-­tv-­shows. Coward, Rosalind. 1990. Greening the Child. New Statesman and Society 3 (102): 40–41.

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Dahlstrom, Michael F., and Dietram A. Scheufele. 2010. Diversity of Television Exposure and its Association with the Cultivation of Concern for Environmental Risks. Environmental Communication 4 (1): 54–65. Davis, Julie M. 2015. What is Early Childhood Education for Sustainability and Why Does It Matter? In Young Children and the Environment: Early Education for Sustainability, ed. Julie M.  Davis, 7–31. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Dickson, Jeremy. 2020. What Broadcasters Want from Eco-conscious Content. Kidscreen, January 28. Accessed January 8, 2022. https://kidscreen. com/2020/01/28/what-­broadcasters-­want-­from-­eco-­conscious-­content/. Elliott, Sue, and Julie Davis. 2009. Exploring the Resistance: An Australian Perspective on Educating for Sustainability in Early Childhood. International Journal of Early Childhood 41 (2): 65–77. Emerald Films. n.d. Project Planet. Emerald Films. Accessed October 1, 2021. https://emeraldfilms.com.au/production/project-­planet/. Fisch, Shalom M. 2003. Children’s Learning from Educational Television: Sesame Street and beyond. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Foster, Laura, and Yaroslav Lukov. 2019. Climate Change: Bafta Calls for More Environment Plot lines on TV. BBC News, May 15. Accessed September 16, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-­environment-­48269930. Gauntlett, David. 2005. Moving Experiences: Media Effects and Beyond. Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing. Gerbner, George. 1998. Cultivation Analysis: An Overview. Mass Communication and Society 1 (3–4): 175–194. Hartley, Bonny L., Richard C. Thompson, and Sabine Pahl. 2015. Marine Litter Education Boosts Children’s Understanding and Self-reported Actions. Marine Pollution Bulletin 90: 209–217. Hawley, Erin. 2018. Children’s Television, Environmental Pedagogy and the (un) NATURAL world of dirtgirlworld. Continuum 32 (2): 162–172. Higgins, Chris. 2015. 11 Sesame Street Videos for Earth Day. Mental Floss, April 22. Accessed October 19, 2021. https://www.mentalfloss.com/ article/63336/11-­sesame-­street-­videos-­earth-­day. Hill, Lisa. 2009. Play School keeps it Real. Media International Australia 132: 67–77. Hill, Jennifer Ann. 2011. Endangered Childhoods: How Consumerism is Impacting Child and Youth Identity. Media, Culture & Society 33 (3): 347–362. Kapur, Jyotsna. 2005. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Keliher, Vicki. 1997. Children’s Perceptions of Nature. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 6 (3): 240–243. Kellstedt, Paul M., Sammy Zahran, and Arnold Vedlitz. 2008. Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and

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Pramling Samuelsson and Yoshie Kaga, 9–17. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Sandler, Ronald L. 2013. Environmental Virtue Ethics. In The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette. Hoboken: Wiley–Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee090. Sesame Workshop. 2009. My World is Green and Growing: Nature Explorer’s Journal. New York: Sesame Workshop and PNC Grow Up Great. ———. 2021a. Celebrate Earth Day with Sesame Street Books, Videos, and More. Sesame Workshop, April 13. Accessed October 19, 2021. https:// www.sesameworkshop.org/press-­r oom/press-­r eleases/celebrate-­e arth-­ day-­sesame-­street-­books-­videos-­and-­more. ———. 2021b. Sesame Workshop and SC Johnson Launch New Resources that Foster Children’s Curiosity and a Love of Science. Sesame Workshop, May 24. Accessed October 3, 2021. https://www.sesameworkshop.org/press-­room/ press-­r eleases/sesame-­w orkshop-­a nd-­s c-­j ohnson-­l aunch-­n ew-­r esources-­ foster-­childrens. Shanahan, James, Michael Morgan, and Mads Stenbjerre. 1997. Green or brown? Television and the Cultivation of Environmental Concern. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 41 (3): 305–323. Simis, Molly J., Haley Madden, Michael A.  Cacciatore, and Sara K.  Yeo. 2016. The Lure of Rationality: Why Does the Deficit Model Persist in Science Communication? Public Understanding of Science 25 (4): 400–414. Whyte, Alexandra. 2017. Is TV Really Sheltering Kids from Climate Change? Kidscreen, March 13. Accessed January 8, 2022. https://kidscreen. com/2017/03/13/is-­tv-­really-­sheltering-­kids-­from-­climate-­change/. Wild Kratts. n.d. The Kratt Brothers Creature Hero Foundation. Accessed December 23, 2021. https://www.wildkratts.com/creature-­hero-­foundation/. Winograd, Ken. 2016. Teaching in Times of Environmental Crises: What on Earth are Elementary Teachers To Do? In Education in Times of Environmental Crises: Teaching Children to Be Agents of Change, ed. Ken Winograd, 3–13. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Nature on Screen: Making ‘the Environment’ Visible in Children’s Film

In this chapter, I will continue to investigate how media can equip children with knowledge about the more-than-human world, and/or promote a sense of personal efficacy in the face of environmental problems. Having established that children’s news and television programmes can address young audiences in a way that promotes (or assumes) environmental literacies, here I turn my attention to children’s film. My concern in this chapter is with the process of making environmental issues visible—or, conversely, the capacity of screen texts to hide or obscure environmental problems. I pose two questions: to what extent are contemporary children’s films being produced in a way that invites reflection on environmental problems? And if such an environmental ethic does inform the production of children’s film, how are children being constructed as viewers of both environmental problems and the more-than-human world itself? In Chap. 2, I proposed that the very idea of children as viewers of nature-on-screen has become normalised and that the consumption of screened nature, especially in the form of wildlife documentaries, is often considered a healthier, more acceptable form of ‘screen time’ for children. Below, I focus not on documentaries but on fictional films designed, primarily, to entertain. In choosing these parameters for the chapter’s analysis, I leave behind the ‘edutainment’ genre discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4, and wade deeply into the children’s film industry, where the objectives of enchantment and profit-making inform representational patterns and choices. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hawley, Environmental Communication for Children, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_5

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Films made for entertainment can certainly invite audiences to become knowledgeable about environmental problems or solutions, and/or promote a sense of personal environmental efficacy, through a variety of strategies and to varying degrees. Some children’s films confront environmental problems directly; others take a more subtle or ‘sidelong’ glance at them; others obscure them altogether. Below, I explore these three ways a film might position itself—and its young audiences—in relation to the environmental crisis. I also explore the types of ‘looking’ that are involved in each case: both the practices of ‘hiding’ or ‘making visible’ that inhibit or allow a film to cultivate knowledge about planetary well-being and the various ways in which the childlike gaze might be mobilised in relation to environmental literacy. In other words, how might filmmakers invite children to ‘see’ nature in a time of crisis? Firstly, I analyse The Jungle Book, a 2016 Disney film made in the shadow of climate change with missed opportunities for climate communication, that nevertheless alters the narrative of its source text in a way that seems informed by changed understandings of the human/nature relationship. Secondly, I consider how other Disney films—namely, Frozen II (2019) and Moana (2016)—have addressed environmental problems through a sidelong glance. Finally, I turn to The Lorax (2012), an openly environmental film and an adaptation of a famously ‘green’ children’s story, which nevertheless encounters problems when it brings this tale into the commercialised space of children’s cinema. I undertake these analyses with acknowledgement that children’s films cannot always be easily categorised in relation to real-­ world concerns; so The Lorax is both a work of deliberate pro-­environmental communication and, due to its sponsorship deals, an example of greenwashing, while The Jungle Book—preoccupied with its relationship to an earlier text and its own status as a technological achievement—is nevertheless a new configuration of the human/nature relationship in which we find the imprint of changed attitudes towards the more-than-human world. With this in mind, this chapter will also investigate the role played by transmedia extensions and paratexts, which can confirm, illuminate, or undermine the environmental messages at work in children’s film.

From Ecocinema to Disney: Children’s Film and the More-Than-Human World This chapter draws from prior work on ecocinema. Paula Willoquet-­ Maricondi defines ecocinema as a mode of filmmaking that “aims to have an impact on audience’s environmental values and behaviour, and thus to

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inspire viewers to take personal and political action”. Works of ecocinema, she tells us, seek to be “consciousness-raising” (2010: 45); they are films “whose overt intent is to educate and provoke personal and political action in response to environmental challenges” (2010: 44). MacDonald adds that through its representation of the natural world, ecocinema fosters “deep appreciation of and an ongoing commitment to the natural environment” (2012: 19), while Ingram observes that an “eco film” is usually defined as one that “has a conceptual content which more or less explicitly promotes ecological ideas, or, more generally, an ecological sensibility” (2012: 44). Individual children’s films—such as FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Wall.E (2008), and Princess Mononoke (1997)—are occasionally discussed within this burgeoning field of study (see Moore 2016; Starosielski 2011; Parham 2016), suggesting that there is some intersection between children’s media and ecocinema, although this point of intersection itself has not been fully explored. In this chapter, as well as determining how film might contribute to the building of environmental literacies through strategies of looking and making visible, I want to probe the connections between children’s film and ecocinema. I have deliberately chosen Hollywood texts as objects of analysis, two of them Disney products, in order to open a discussion about the tension between the commercial imperatives of the children’s film industry and the influence of children’s film on thinking about the human/nature relationship. This chapter, therefore, tests the limits of ecocinema by considering its application to a child audience. The definitions of ecocinema provided in the previous paragraph emphasise intentionality: namely, the intent of the filmmaker to promote engagement with environmental themes in a way that leads to the uptake of pro-environmental behaviour or action. Children’s movies are not often made with this intent, and children’s film for the most part sits within a zone of production that is not easily aligned with the tenets of ecocinema. Arguably, mainstream children’s film trains young viewers, first and foremost, in the practices of spectatorship and consumption that align with the film industry as embodied by Hollywood. Children’s film is “hypercommercial” (Moore 2016): many children’s films are blockbusters and some are tent-pole productions that support the film industry by drawing in large numbers of viewers. As Kapur writes, children’s film “has been at the forefront of the commercialization of culture, of the construction of ‘consumption webs’ such that media (film being one) and other commodities constantly advertise each other” (2005: 48). Such films are made

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in a risk-averse production environment by studios owned by media conglomerates and are constrained by marketing and branding strategies designed to draw children into the market as consumers. It is in its commercial nature that children’s film most notably conflicts with ecocinema. As Rust and Monami point out, there is some disagreement amongst scholars over what ecocinema is and what it cannot be, and there is particular debate over whether commercial, Hollywood films can be considered ecocinema (2012: 3)—although such debates often obscure the fact that all cinema is “ecologically embedded” (Rust and Monami 2012: 4). MacDonald argues that the fundamental job of an ecocinema is not to produce pro-environmental narratives shot in a conventional Hollywood manner… [but] to provide new kinds of film experience that demonstrate an alternative to conventional media-spectatorship and help to nurture a more environmentally progressive mindset. (2012: 20, emphasis in original)

Willoquet-Maricondi, meanwhile, differentiates between “environmentalist films” and “ecocinema” using the latter’s “consciousness-raising and activist intentions, as well as responsibility to heighten awareness about contemporary issues and practices affecting planetary health” (2010: 45). Ingram, though, finds such opposition between ecocinema and environmental films to be “restricting” (2012: 58), noting that films that fall outside the ecocinema space can still “promote cognitive and emotional learning about environmental issues” (2012: 59). Rust, too, notes that even the most “hyperbolic” of Hollywood narratives can present themselves as “prescient calls for humanity to alter its deeply dysfunctional relationship with the planet before it is forced to do so by the planet itself” (2012: 204), while Brereton argues that “[w]ithin many blockbuster films, the evocation of nature and sublime spectacle helps to dramatise contemporary ecological issues and debates” (2005: 11). It is for this reason that Sean Cubitt, in his seminal book Eco Media, investigates “environmental themes in popular media”, in particular “popular mediations of frequently voiced concerns over biosecurity, anthropomorphism, environmental ethics, over-exploitation of resources, ecoterrorism, genetic modification and global climate change” (2005: 1). Analysing a range of texts including Hollywood franchises such as Lord of the Rings, Cubitt concerns himself with the way “popular media think aloud and inpublic about who we are, where we are going, and what debts we owe to the world we live

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in” (2005: 1). Building on this prior work, Chap. 5 acknowledges that the boundaries of ecocinema are both policed and debated in scholarship of green media culture, and it takes the view that popular knowledge about nature and environmental concerns is both collected and contested in children’s filmic texts (including those made by Hollywood). Indeed, children’s film has had a powerful role to play in establishing patterns of nature representation on screen. Many children’s films deal with the theme of human stewardship of the natural world and depict human characters interacting with nature in a caring or protective way. Often, these are films that adapt children’s literary texts, where again, the theme of environmental stewardship is abundant. In particular (and as mentioned in previous chapters), children’s stories—on page and screen— often feature animals as protagonists, and/or depict child protagonists befriending, protecting, or otherwise interacting with animals. In contrast, there are relatively few stories made for adults that foreground the perspectives, struggles, and actions of a non-human animal. Already, then, the narratives that children encounter are conducive to environmental messaging because they are attentive to the perspectives of non-human animals even if they do not actively engage with environmental themes. Julia Corbett notes that animals are “the perfect shorthand communication symbol” for representing environmental issues (2006: 179–180), which means that the animal stories we encounter as children may establish patterns of representation that environmental communicators can use to engage our attention as adults. As Myers and Saunders (2002: 153) argue, “animals provide a bridge to caring about the natural world”, because we can interact with them socially and emotionally in a way that we cannot with other aspects of nature. If a film asks a child audience to care about an animal, then, it is paving the way for broader participation in the ethics of environmental care. As observed in Chap. 1, this link between animals and environmental learning dates back to the animal stories of eighteenth-century European children’s literature, which were often used to teach natural history and sometimes encouraged thinking about conservation and animal protection (Spencer 2010: 472). Filmic adaptations of classic literary texts such as Charlotte’s Web, which depict a caring relationship between child and animal protagonists, might therefore play a role in making young audiences more receptive to broader messages about environmental stewardship. At play here once again is the construction of children as closer to nature and more curious about non-human animals than adults, as well as

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a conflation of children with non-human animals. This construction guides the makers of children’s films: as Fritz (2020: 484) notes, “there is a tendency among producers of children’s media culture to associate children with animals, and hence, with nature”. This is both an opportunity for environmental communicators seeking to reach children, and a problem to be acknowledged, for if the ‘caring child’ is normalised in cultural narratives for children then it is possible that ‘care’ itself is assumed but not fully explored by these narratives. Like any story that is told a thousand times but never critically investigated, the story of the child who cares for animals may well obscure pathways to environmental stewardship rather than creating them, leaving ‘real’ children with little connection to the myth of child/animal closeness. There is also a problematic assumption in such narratives that both animals and children inhabit a space (an ‘innocent’ space) outside the politics and ideologies in which adults are entrapped. Importantly, though, children’s stories about animals often involve a rethinking of the human/nature relationship. This rethinking can be triggered by the use of animal characters and the invitation to inhabit an animal’s point of view. In recent years, a plethora of children’s films has invited young audiences to view the relationship (at times, the conflict) between humans and non-humans from the perspective of a wild animal: films such as Finding Nemo (2003) and Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), for example, depict humans as threats and encourage empathy for non-human animals whose habitats are invaded, altered, or destroyed. Even when these animals are highly anthropomorphised, as is Mr Fox in Wes Anderson’s filmic adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale, they offer a unique vantage point from which young audiences might look upon the human impact on the natural world in a way that privileges non-human experiences and needs. Mr Fox may look and sound like human actor George Clooney, wear a shirt and tie, and walk on his hind legs, but he also exudes a vulpine otherness, while the human farmers who hunt him and his family are, through a fox’s eyes, monstrous, repulsive, and unjust. Inhabiting an uncanny space between animal and human, the stop-motion Mr Fox is able, strangely, to model two sets of behaviour for young audiences: the ‘fantastic’ animal qualities of the fox, and the positive human qualities of kindness to other animal species. Of importance here is less anthropomorphism than the evocation of a child’s perspective, which does not assume superiority over non-human animals. In attempting to adopt a child’s-eye view, the makers of children’s films (and the writers of children’s stories)

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often enter a space where human/animal boundaries can be broken down: this is also why children’s stories on page and screen frequently involve boundary-crossing transformations where humans become animals or shrink in size so that they must negotiate the world as an animal. We cannot underestimate the influence of Disney (both the man and the studio) on the global imagining of nature and the human/animal relationship. From early animated features like Bambi (1942) to the True Life Adventures documentary series (1948–1960) to the Disneynature label (established in 2008), Disney has long engaged in the screening of animals as entertainment for children and family audiences, playing a significant part in the conceptualisation of wild nature as box office entertainment. The Disneynature label, in particular, and its suite of nature documentaries—many of which are released on Earth Day, often with associated conservation campaigns—has allowed one of the world’s largest media conglomerates to take on an explicit environmental communicator role. Early Disney animated feature films, meanwhile, established patterns of representation relating to wild nature that continue to infuse global narratives today. The goal in Bambi, for example, was to achieve a level of representational fidelity that allowed nature “to tell her own story” (Field 1942, cited in Payne 1995: 139). Depicting conflict between forest animals and the men who hunt them, Bambi engaged in environmental communication by playing a key role in shaping American attitudes to nature. Writing of the death of Bambi’s mother, who is shot by hunters in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Lutts points out that “[t]he film never voiced a word against hunting” but its “anti-hunting message was conveyed on a completely emotional level through sympathy with its characters”, spurring public opposition to deer hunting (1992: 162). Whitley also reminds us that the film’s careful and caring approach to the visualisation of nature itself communicated a message of care: The care and artistic sensitivity that Disney animators brought to this project, including choices in the way the environment that the deer live in is represented, heighten the audience’s attentiveness to detail in a way that allows the significance of the animals’ lives to acquire multiple meanings. (2012: 3)

While animation itself and its capacity for representing nature in an authentic way will be discussed in Chap. 6, it is worth noting here that Disney’s animated films have received criticism for their depiction of

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natural wildness. Murphy argues that Disney consistently presents a worldview that is “andocentric” and “based on denying wild nature as an integral part of the biosphere” (1995: 125), while both Murphy (1995) and Whitley (2012) observe that nature is “domesticated” in films like Snow White and viewed “through the lens of andocentrism” as an object of domination (Murphy 1995: 127). Child viewers of Disney films are, therefore, exposed to ideologies that view nature as a resource to be tapped for human use. Writing of Disney’s depiction of animals since Bambi, Cubitt also touches on the domestication of nature when he states, these animals were closer to the stuffed toys that began to fill children’s bedrooms in the 19th century: safe and infantile companions for the very young, somehow younger even than themselves, on whom the child might practice caring, or indeed violence, without responsibility. The animals themselves disappeared under the blanket of messages they were burdened with teaching to the young. Older and crueller tales of wolves gave way to cuddly tales of teenage lions. (2005: 31)

It is certainly the case that Disney’s influence on the popular imagining of animals has stemmed as much from its toys as from its films, with the two, as Cubitt observes, inextricably entwined. In this way, Disney products promote the commodification of nature as well as its domestication. One of Disney’s more recent films ‘about’ animals, Zootopia (2016), openly displays both these attitudes towards nature. Accompanied by an extensive range of toys featuring ‘cute’ and ‘cuddly’ versions of the animal characters, the narrative of Zootopia takes anthropomorphism to such an extreme that the animals literally strive to become human and suppress their ‘wild’ instincts, which are referred to within the narrative as ‘savage’. The message in Zootopia seems to be that children, as they mature into adults, must leave behind their connections to wild nature; this is depicted without elegy or irony. In a reading of this film that emphasises its capitalist ideologies, Fritz argues that Zootopia “deploys the full force of Disney’s cultural might to promote ideals of racial equality and social harmony, but also neoliberal values such as consumerism and a free market system” and therefore the film “functions as a feature-length advertisement… for the consumerist lifestyle” (2020: 476). This example reminds us that the mere depiction of animals as characters in Disney films—or indeed, any films— does not automatically lead to a radical destabilising of anthropocentric perspectives.

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Others have argued that representations of nature in Disney’s films are not as prominent as they should be. Whitley observes that many of Disney’s early animated features “grounded” themselves in “environments that were recognizably part of wild nature” such as the forest in which Snow White spends so much of her time (2012: 7); however, others have noted that depictions of wild nature are lessening across the timeline of Disney’s productions. Prévot-Julliard and Julliard, for example, studied the depiction of ‘green nature’ in animated Disney films over a seventy-year period from 1937 to 2010. Their findings showed that the proportion of outdoor scenes with green nature decreased over time, as did animal species richness; in recent Disney films, they argue, “nature is represented with less complexity and biodiversity realism” (Prévot-Julliard and Julliard 2015: 678). This, they propose, is suggestive of a “decrease in the extent to which individual connection to nature is being nurtured in Western cultures” (Prévot-Julliard and Julliard 2015: 678): if production teams themselves are losing their connection to nature, it is little wonder that “nature is receding” in children’s media (Prévot-Julliard and Julliard 2015: 673). There is an interesting variation on Kahn’s notion of generational amnesia here (2002), with the suggestion that as children grow up without an experience of nature’s richness and complexity, and become media-makers or storytellers themselves, they will pass on symbolic experiences of nature that are lessened—or, they will not be compelled to pass on such experiences at all. Disney’s relationship with nature, therefore, is troubled, and while Disney films continue to offer templates for understanding the human/ nature relationship, they are often underpinned by anthropocentric beliefs and narrative patterns—or undermined by absences. At the same time, it is in Disney’s films that we find many of the aforementioned transformations: the boundary-crossing moments where humans become animals or the invitations to take on an animal’s point of view. More broadly, there are many Disney productions that seem to cultivate a sense of care towards non-human nature, as did Bambi in the 1940s. As King observes, “Disney productions’ empathetic identification with animals laid the groundwork for the American eco-political climate from the 1960s onward” (1996: 61), particularly through a rewriting of the more traditional idea of nature as hostile. King identifies storytelling as a pathway to empathy for both animals and their habitats, arguing that in many Disney productions “nature was personalized so that animals had ‘rights’, and their ‘homes’ became private sanctuaries to be respected and protected as an extension

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of civil property rights” (1996: 61). Importantly, she compares Disney’s influence on understandings of the human/nature relationship to that of Rachel Carson and writes, The implications of film drama featuring animal rather than human stars hold the key to understanding not only the human/nature face-off as a cultural problem, but the power of film to temper, guide, and shape that relationship. (King 1996: 62)

In telling the stories of animals and of nature itself, then, children’s films have the potential to commodify and silence nature, or to resist ways of thinking that depict animals as objects, opening the path to consideration of non-human animal rights, needs, and perspectives. It is not easy to resolve these contradictions, and perhaps we should not seek to. In her analysis of Bambi and Finding Nemo, Bruckner recognises without seeking to resolve the tensions and contradictions inherent in children’s film and its representation of the more-than-human world. Bruckner observes that such films can positively impact children’s “sense of wonder for the nonhuman world” (2010: 187), but she also writes of the representation of nature in these films as “problematic” (2010: 188), due particularly to anthropomorphism, which “necessarily sees the natural world through an anthropocentric lens that establishes humanity as the barometer for normative values and affirms the centrality of human life” (2010: 188), on the one hand, but also “incites a generation to see nature as a living system of which we are only a part” (2010: 189). Bambi, for example, gives “centrality” to nature and the non-human world, and invites the young viewer to develop curiosity towards the forest ecosystem it depicts, even while reproducing this natural world within human (particularly, patriarchal) ideologies (Bruckner 2010: 190–191). While Fritz (2020) advocates for an “oppositional” reading position when decoding Disney films about nature, Bruckner’s approach is more open to multiplicity, treating Disney films as complex objects that exist within systems of knowledge about education, entertainment, and consumerism, while also, occasionally, engaging in environmental thematics. Like Bruckner, I recognise that children’s films participate in meaningful and complex ways in the production of ‘the environment’ for popular engagement, discussion, and consumption. Indeed, there are spectacular examples of children’s films that have tackled environmental problems in a direct way. Pixar’s Wall.E, for example, depicts a world which humans

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have destroyed due to the accumulation of waste; Happy Feet (2006) exposes the human damage caused to Antarctic ecosystems through overfishing and the production of plastic waste; and Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) represents climate change as a threat to the animal characters, albeit without direct references to human culpability. Such films have contributed to the mainstreaming of environmental issues as topics for public discussion, while also mainstreaming the idea of children as an audience invested in environmental concerns, but their success as works of ecocinema is debated. Starosielski notes that children’s environmental film is often marked by its “failure to map paths for behavioral change” (2011: 147), while Moore (2016) finds that there are key omissions and silences in the way children’s films deal with environmental issues, relating particularly to the failure of these films to fully define environmental problems, assign responsibility, or explore potential solutions. I will turn now to a film that is full of such silences and omissions, while also embodying the tensions, desires, and possibilities that define Disney’s relationship with nature.

The Jungle Book: Obscuring Environmental Problems Jon Favreau’s 2016 film The Jungle Book is a live-action remake of Disney’s 1967 animated classic, which was in turn based on a collection of short stories published in 1894 by English author Rudyard Kipling. Now in the public domain, the stories have been retold many times, both within and outside of the Disney space; indeed, Favreau’s film famously competed with another version of the tale, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, made for Netflix in 2018 (Benson 2020). More so than the Netflix film, however, Favreau’s The Jungle Book was a critical and box office success: it ranked at number five on the list of highest-grossing movies worldwide in 2016, received a rating of 95% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, and won an Academy Award for best visual effects (in competition with adult-centric texts including Star Wars: Rogue One and Deepwater Horizon). This success and visibility make The Jungle Book an important children’s film, and also an important adaptation. As we saw in Chap. 3, what adaptation gives us is difference: the pleasures of difference, certainly, but for children, also, the difference that leads to accessibility and opportunity (for without a modern-day adaptation of The Jungle Book, today’s children may not find a pathway to Kipling’s stories, or a connection with them). The Jungle Book is of interest to me because it depicts the

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relationship between child and nature, and also because it is a variation on an older story. Retelling a story activates the opportunity for different perspectives; as Linda Hutcheon has observed, adaptation in literature, media, and culture is like biological adaptation because it involves “replication with variation” (2013: 174). But what differences or variations can be detected in this film’s representation of childhood, the environment, and the human/nature relationship? Certainly, Favreau’s film imag(in)es a human/animal closeness in which the child’s connection to nature is a privilege that allows them to experience animal ‘life’. This depiction of child/animal closeness is extracted from the original text and disentangled from imperialist, andocentric ideologies. At times, Kipling’s Jungle Book stories invite young readers to feel, experience, and inhabit the animal’s physical and emotional self. For example, at the beginning of the story Mowgli’s Brothers, we are told: “Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips’” (Kipling 2006: 2). The child reader is here drawn into the wolf’s body, a blurring of the boundary between child-self and imagined animal. But a few pages later Kipling addresses the human reader and invites them to look at the animal: “if you had been watching”, Kipling writes, “you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world—the wolf checked in mid-spring” (2006: 7). This second mode of address, to the human as watcher, is more common in Kipling’s stories than the first— we are often invited to marvel at the shiny blackness of Bagheera the panther’s fur or the “fantastic knots and curves” (Kipling 2006: 54) of the snake Kaa’s huge body. The notion of the human gaze upon the wild animal is also a tool of domination within the narrative, for even as a baby, Mowgli the “man-cub” can stare down any of the non-human creatures in the jungle: as Kipling puts it, “he has the eyes that make the Jungle-People afraid” (2006: 51). In Favreau’s film, too, the emphasis is often on watching the technological spectacle of digitally created on-screen animals—a point to which I will return shortly. The relationship between human child and wild nature is an important element of Kipling’s original Jungle Book tales; indeed, it is the core element of the text, which all adaptations must strive to transform and/or be faithful to. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Spencer has pointed out, children were perceived to be “closer to nature than adults” and “were thought to have a special affinity with animals” (2010:

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470)—however, Mowgli isn’t just any child: he is a ‘wild child’, a liminal figure. As Hotchkiss writes: The idyllic freedom of the child in nature was a popular notion in both the Romantic and Victorian periods. But the wild child, or what we might call the child of nature taken to extremes, stirs the imagination in deeper ways. This is the child represented as radically orphaned, existing outside of language, and alienated from human social bonds. (2001: 435)

In Kipling’s tales and in most versions of the story to come, the ‘wild child’ is caught between the two worlds of nature and culture, and must grapple with this sense of inbetweenness. Mowgli struggles to find a sense of home in both the jungle and the human village, and resultantly, he slips between the two worlds, while within him, human nature and jungle nature conflict. In the end, though, for Kipling, the child/nature relationship remains one of domination: Mowgli’s growing-up process involves learning and understanding the power he can exert over the non-human animals whose habitat he shares. It is for this reason that Kipling is described by journalist Ryan Gilbey as a “problematic, imperialist writer”; reviewing Disney’s 2016 version of The Jungle Book for The Guardian, Gilbey warns readers that “[i]n Kipling’s stories, the superiority of man is stated with a harshness that will startle those whose only image of Mowgli comes courtesy of Disney” (2016). Less kindly, Katharine Trendacosta describes Kipling as a “racist fuck” (2016). Writing in Gizmodo, Trendacosta points to the “inherent racism and imperialism baked into The Jungle Book”, linking Kipling’s themes of dominance over nature to a sense of cultural superiority, the othering of non-white cultures, and the representation of a savage/civilised dichotomy. When Kipling’s text is adapted, Trendacosta notes, these themes are hard to dislodge (2016). Such imperialist ideologies and themes of domination fell easily into step with the Disney mode of representation when The Jungle Book was transformed into an animated feature film in 1967. This troubles the assumption that the earlier Disney film is ‘about’ nature or that it depicts ‘wildness’: Murphy is referring specifically to the 1967 version of The Jungle Book when he writes scathingly about Disney’s “andocentric” worldview on nature which is based on “denying wild nature as an integral part of the biosphere” (1995: 125). Favreau’s film, then, lives in the shadow of two giants: as a film of 2016 it is shadowed by climate change itself and the growing awareness of deep-set problems in the way humans

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relate to nature; it also lives in the shadow of the “andocentric” earlier texts it adapts. In particular, as an exercise in rebranding, The Jungle Book must rejuvenate but also be faithful to its predecessor while untangling the earlier film’s ideological knots and correcting its injustices. In one of the many interviews he gave on the promotional circuit for The Jungle Book, Favreau spoke about the shift in attitudes towards nature since Kipling’s time; today, he observed, nature is something “to be protected”, not “overcome” (quoted in Keegan 2016). It is interesting to consider whether, and how, this attitude guides the representations of childhood, nature, and the child/nature relationship in the film. I propose that unlike its 1967 predecessor, the 2016 Jungle Book does not deny wild nature but celebrates it, and celebrates its own capacity to represent it (which is still, of course, a type of domination—a reminder that untying those ideological knots was a difficult task). The jungle itself is an important on-screen character in Favreau’s film and is represented as organic, a living, breathing, complex ecosystem. This is made clear within the first few moments of viewing. Our entry to the film comes via the fairy-tale castle that forms the Walt Disney Pictures logo, but after we have passed this official ‘gatekeeper’ of the tale, we enter a tropical landscape through which we move as though floating down a river. The soundscape features a variety of animal and plant sounds to signify to the viewer that they are entering a realm of high biodiversity. We see waterfalls, lush greenery, rich and varied plant life, insects, and birds flitting about. We then see Mowgli running through the jungle, just one of many species to inhabit this wild place—he moves swiftly, running from something that growls; he climbs easily over, up, and into trees and jumps from branch to branch. It is notable that the film shows us Mowgli, first and foremost, as a creature who belongs in the jungle—he understands it, he knows how to navigate it, and to untrained eyes, the jungle itself is as photorealistic as the human child who moves through it. We soon see that the creature chasing Mowgli as he runs is his friend Bagheera the panther and that the fierce growls were feigned; Bagheera is teaching Mowgli to run with the wolf pack, and the scene turns even more peaceful as Mowgli strolls happily through the jungle with Bagheera and the wolf pack around him. There are many such scenes in the film, of Mowgli negotiating the natural world around him, moving peacefully or sometimes warily but always confidently through various jungle-scapes. Human domination of nature is rarely depicted, although there are moments when non-human nature, as embodied by wild animals, seems itself overpowering, particularly in

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scenes with Kaa the snake or King Louie the gigantopithecus, who fill the screen and tower over Mowgli. Overall, though, Favreau depicts a mostly harmonious human/nature relationship in his Jungle Book adaptation. Notably, the film’s conclusion allows Mowgli to rejoin the jungle—unlike his predecessor in the 1967 film, who is lured away into the human world—and he is seen in the final shot reclining in a tree with his animal friends Baloo and Bagheera; an image of a human child at home in the more-than-human world. Katy Waldman, writing for Slate, notes that the Disney remake is “a sweet, funny film in which peace and goodness defeat violence and cruelty”, and she recognises in Favreau’s film a “softening” process through which the severity of Kipling’s story is altered with a twenty-first-century child audience in mind (2016). Importantly, though, Waldman reads this softening not as a process of ‘Disneyfication’, where a classic tale is dumbed down, but as a type of subversion: seen in this way, the Favreau film seeks to radically overturn Kipling’s narrative of man’s dominance over nature. Nevertheless, while making visible the wonders of nature, the film largely hides environmental problems, including those that relate to ‘jungle’ environments, such as deforestation, poaching, and climate change itself. Importantly, too, this is a natural world that is built, not grown. The Jungle Book was filmed entirely on blue-screen stages and its ‘jungle’ is a photorealistic digital creation that does not directly derive from any real jungle that exists anywhere in the world. Photos of jungle environments were used as inspiration for the visual effects team, but Favreau himself states that a combination of production imperatives, technological possibilities, and a desire to recapture a certain fantastic (i.e., fantasy-driven) quality of the animated film led to an avoidance of location-based shooting: The idea of going out to the jungle and shooting this, it just felt like it wouldn’t have the magic that the 1967 film had had… Why not use the technology to create a whole world that transports you? Let’s really embrace this new technology and see what we can do if we push its limit. (Quoted in Rawal 2016)

While it represents an organic natural world, then, the film does not have any grounding in wild nature itself. In order to create the jungle, the visual effects team used vegetation modelling software called SpeedTree, which was also used to create the alien world of Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. SpeedTree allows an animated, organic-looking tree

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to be created from scratch, and there were 200 unique trees created for The Jungle Book, each with approximately 1 million leaves, in order to signify a sense of vastness and also uniqueness—the species richness of a jungle (Schwank et  al. 2016). This information about the production and post-production processes involved in this screening of nature is easy to uncover online and indeed, audience fascination with visual effects processes and the importance of ‘making of’ paratexts as promotional tools (Tryon 2009; Gray 2010) ensure that audiences of all ages can see how such screen ecosystems are built. The animals, too, are digitally created, and the young actor who portrays Mowgli, Neel Sethi, gives the only non-­ CGI-­based performance in the film. He is its organic centre: the real child at the intersection between imagined nature and technologies of the screen. Within the film, Mowgli/Sethi is often seen interacting with a vibrant, lush, real-looking natural world, but in promotional texts, including on-set photos, he is seen interacting with bare blue-screen environments, artificial stand-ins for computer-generated characters, and generally with the mechanics of cinema itself, including the director and crew (see, e.g., Hall 2016). He is often depicted as a child at play—both the jungle and the film sets are giant playgrounds in which childhood is enacted and performed. Favreau has said of his film, “[w]e’re building an entire world virtually… [and] the goal is to make all of that technology disappear so when you see it, you feel you are just immersed into this world” (quoted in ReelnReel 2016). At work here are the politics of digital effects and their in/visibility; for the film asks both child and adult viewers to look at nature and to imagine being in nature, but its paratexts—especially interviews with the cast and crew, on-set images, and even theatrical posters depicting each actor beside the animal they voice—work hard to emphasise the human elements in this digital film about nature: the performance of the young actor as the human soul of the film; the vision and hard work of Favreau, the director; the celebrity status of the voice actors; and the craft and genius of the visual effects artists who can ‘build’ trees in a virtual world. This emphasis on human craft and identity is probably a strategy to humanise what is overwhelmingly a technological achievement in cinema—but the result is that an anthropocentric view of nature is perpetuated, and an opportunity to represent nature’s intrinsic value is missed, as is the opportunity to direct the viewer’s gaze towards environmental problems.

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The Sidelong Glance: Moana and Frozen II As The Jungle Book shows us, the process of making ‘nature’ visible on-­ screen requires a production team to make decisions about the extent to which environmental problems are revealed or concealed. In the case of The Jungle Book, while the human/nature relationship was largely reconfigured in a way that corrects the injustices of earlier versions of the tale, a revealing of environmental problems was seemingly at odds with the industry imperatives behind the film’s production, and therefore avoided. However, such avoidance is not the only path that can be taken by filmmakers. Other children’s films invite more of a ‘sidelong glance’ at environmental problems, addressing them through strategies of allegory, suggestion, metaphor, and fantasy. Such a sidelong glance is often used to address climate change, in particular, which (as noted in Chaps. 3 and 4) is a difficult topic to interweave into children’s stories—a “tough nut to crack”, as Charlie Brooker puts it (quoted in Foster and Lukov 2019). Yet, in children’s film, there is more than one way to “crack” the climate change “nut”. Just as children’s stories often involve animal protagonists, so too do they frequently incorporate wild natural settings, and often, such settings themselves are triggers for climate-related stories to be told. Disney’s Frozen (2013), for example, a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, is set in Scandinavia and draws much of its visual and narrative power from the changing properties of water. Characters are threatened by transition; literally, by cooling or warming, melting or freezing: Olaf, the snowman, will die if he melts (though he seems, at first, blissfully unaware of this basic fact of his existence), and Princess Anna becomes a statue of ice. In the 2019 sequel, Frozen II, these allusions to climate change are more fully realised. Here, we find Queen Elsa ruling over the city of Arendelle, aided by her sister Anna, but when natural disasters befall the city, the sisters realise that nature is out of balance. They travel to a distant forest where they meet the Indigenous people, the Northuldrans (based upon the Sámi people of Northern Europe). Anna and Elsa learn that their deceased grandfather, King of the Arendellians, caused harm to the Northuldrans by building a dam that damaged their lands and deprived them of natural resources. The sisters must fix the problem that past generations created and restore balance between nature and its human inhabitants. Here, the confrontation of contested histories is depicted as an important step in achieving justice both for Indigenous people and for nature itself.

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In a similar way, the Disney film Moana (2016) engages with climate change through allegorical means. Moana is set in the Pacific Islands, and Disney executives worked closely with Pacific Islander representatives and cultural consultants when making the film in an effort to incorporate rather than appropriate Pacific cultures, narratives, and histories. At the film’s beginning, environmental disaster befalls the island community where the eponymous Moana lives—a black sickness creeps into the land, destroying crops; coconuts crumble into black ash; fishing nets are repeatedly empty (a reference  to overfishing as well as the impact of climate change on ocean and island ecosystems). Young Moana must sail beyond the reef that protects her island community in search of a solution; she eventually persuades the mischievous demigod Māui to return the stolen heart of the goddess Te Fiti, which restores the world. Again, with these themes of destruction, restoration, regeneration, and justice, Moana gestures to climate change without directly confronting it, a point that was noted in many reviews of the film: Rampell (2016), for example, describes Moana as a “parable about climate change and Indigenous rights” that is “disguised in the medium of a feature-length colorful cartoon”. His use of the term “disguised” is telling, as is Rampell’s observation that the inclusion of a climate change theme does not drain any “colour” from this “cartoon”. The implication here is that an animated children’s film cannot ‘look’ at the theme of climate change directly; such thematics must be disguised, and they cannot compete with industry conventions which demand that such a film be colourful and enchanting. Tamaira employs a similar language relating to concealment and revelation in her scholarly analysis of the film, where she discusses how the Disney production team allowed the issue of “ecocide” in Pacific Island Nations to be made visible: rather than concealing the threats confronting the Pacific, Moana in fact illuminates them by using the trope of anti-paradise as a parable to show what happens when the ‘heart’ of the environment… is ‘stolen’ and why there is a critical need for its return if environmental health and balance is to be restored. (2018: 304)

The depiction of Moana herself, meanwhile, aligns with depictions of young Pacific people in environmental campaigns: Moana is not necessarily powerful or empowered, but she is persistent, courageous, and compassionate in the face of environmental disaster, and this recalls, for example, the environmental organisation 350 Pacific’s images of “climate warriors”

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(350.org n.d.), or the proclamation “we are not drowning, we are fighting” which has become “the warrior call of Pacific youth” (SPREP 2021). These examples remind us that, as Bruno Bettelheim (1989) made clear in his book The Uses of Enchantment, children’s stories are not separate from the struggles and politics of ‘real life’. The writers, directors, and production teams behind these two high-profile Disney texts clearly did not believe that children’s film is an apolitical space, or that children’s film should be protected from the incursion of environmental themes. Moana and Frozen II also demonstrate that fantasy and allegory are, or can be, important strategies in pro-environmental communication for children. In both texts, fantasy is used as a device for exploring issues that have real-­ world relevance, and while such stories do not necessarily impart information about environmental problems, they open pathways for communication between children and adults on the topics of climate change and environmental degradation. The sidelong glance may, therefore, be an important aspect of environmental communication for young audiences, but what vision of childhood does it construct? In previous chapters we have seen that children’s environmental media constructs an image of the ‘curious child’, but we do not necessarily find the same insistence in Moana and Frozen II that children do and should want to learn about environmental problems. Indeed, as a strategy for interweaving environmental themes into the fun, colourful, supposedly innocent space of children’s film, the sidelong glance suggests that issues like climate change need to be concealed as much as they are revealed. But interestingly, the sidelong glance is also a decidedly childlike way of seeing. We employ a sidelong glance when it is difficult, uncomfortable, or inappropriate to look at something directly, when we nevertheless want to look at that difficult thing; as well as a knowing glance, it can be a covert way of attending to something, a peeking through the fingers, when we are otherwise not invited or welcome to look, or when we know that what we see might upset or frighten us. It is the sort of viewing strategy that children themselves have long employed when watching scary content that is not made for them, such as horror films (Buckingham 1996; Smith 2005), and here it is employed by adults as a storytelling strategy. What I am proposing here is that the sidelong glance at environmental problems in children’s film is not an invasion of an innocent space, and neither is it a simplification of complex environmental concepts; it is an opening up, a tapping of the veins of possibility that lie within the bedrock of children’s stories; and equally, it is a recognition that children’s

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stories should be made and told in a way that is respectful to Earth, to Indigenous people, and to young people themselves, even when entertainment is the goal.

“We Are the Lorax”: The Trouble with Transmedia The sidelong glance is not the only way in which environmental problems can be made visible in children’s film. At times, a more direct way of looking is mobilised. The Lorax exemplifies this more direct approach. Created by children’s author Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr Seuss), The Lorax was originally published in 1971 and is a colourful, vibrant, heartfelt fable about the environmental destruction caused by overconsumption. A small, wrinkled, yellow being with an enormous moustache and compassionate yet angry eyes, the Lorax is a character who “speaks for the trees”. He bears angry and vocal witness to the destruction of a fictional landscape as the misguided Once-ler and his evil family cut down the beautiful Truffula Trees and pollute the air and water with their factory waste, until nothing is left but a ravaged wasteland. The Lorax is also the voice of hope and promise and is destined to return to the land when someone cares for it. In short, The Lorax is a cautionary tale about the devastating impact of corporate greed on the natural world, and although it was a children’s text, Geisel’s story was deliberately provocative, causing controversy for its sharp environmental messages (Wolfe 2008: 5). The story pivots on the word “unless”, which is left at the site of the Lorax’s disappearance, and the significance of which is explained at the story’s end with the words, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not”. In the digital age these words have become shareable, and they circulate: a quick Google image search shows that they can be found in memes, have been shared on various social media sites, and are plastered across a range of products including T-shirts, keep cups, and—bizarrely—shower curtains. This ringing articulation of the link between care and change has great relevance in the midst of today’s experience of the environmental crisis, as does the conclusion of the story in which the Once-ler passes responsibility for the future to the child reader: Catch! calls the Once-ler. He lets something fall. It’s a Truffula Seed. It’s the last one of all!

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You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

This declaration that the child is ‘in charge’ of the future is powerful. The Lorax, then, is not a story with a happy ending, but a story about agency and possibility: the child here is not the audience for a happy ending, s/he is the maker of it. In 2012, The Lorax was adapted into an animated film by Illumination, a subsidiary of Universal Studios, allowing the Lorax to “speak for the trees” to a new generation of young audiences. Full to the brim with crowd-pleasing songs, scenes, and larger-than-life characters, The Lorax attempts to be faithful to the original tale while also expanding it to fill a ninety-minute viewing experience. In this version of the tale, the action takes place in Thneedville, a completely artificial city where the trees are plastic, and water and air are bottled; the world beyond the city walls is a wasteland. The villain is the Mayor, O’Hare, who sells bottled air to the residents of Thneedville, while the young hero, Ted, seeks out “real trees” to impress his friend Audrey. His journey leads him to the Once-ler, who tells him about the destruction of the trees and about their guardian, the Lorax. Ted eventually reveals the wasted environment outside the city walls to the residents of Thneedville and plants the final Truffula seed, leading to regeneration. This film generated much public discussion, which was largely focused on the film’s environmental messages and/or its authenticity as a ‘green’ text. Reviewing The Lorax for the Australian programme At the Movies, film critic David Stratton (2012) announced that “the basic message is as Green as can be”, adding “I wonder if there’ll be complaints from anti-­ Greens about the indoctrination of children?” There were, indeed. Conservative American radio host Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network claimed that the film was propaganda and that the filmmakers were trying to indoctrinate children with anti-industry and anti-­commercial messages (Sacks 2012; Haglund 2012). This is indicative of a perceived gulf between children’s stories that are ‘about nature’ and those that enter the more ‘politicised’ realm of pro-environmental communication,

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informed by an assumption that childhood is an apolitical space and that the child/nature relationship, too, is ideologically neutral. Other critics expressed problems with the film’s treatment of the beloved original story. As noted in Chap. 3, fidelity is often a key concern in conversations about the adaptation of classic literary texts, and while this concern has been largely dismissed by adaptation scholars, it often surfaces in film reviews (Brooker 2012: 45). In his review of the film, for example, David Edelstein criticises the modernising of the story and also expresses a concern that the medium is wrong for the message: “You can still discern the stark parable beneath the movie’s jokey, facetious tone, but this kind of studio 3-D feature animation is all wrong for the material”, he writes (2012). Stratton gets to the heart of this mismatch between medium and message: “It’s a little ironic”, he observes, “that the so-called ‘real’ trees in this cautionary tale are the strange-looking Truffula Trees, which are brightly coloured and artificial-looking” (2012). His co-host on the programme, fellow critic Margaret Pomeranz, berates him for expecting “green and timber” in an animated text, raising issues about representation and organicism in animation that will be discussed further in Chap. 6. It is notable, though, that The Lorax’s heavy-handed messages about protecting and respecting the natural environment are articulated at the same time as digital animation is used to simulate or replace ‘nature’ itself: for, much like The Jungle Book, the film depicts a world that is bright, colourful, and somehow evocative of Louv’s “nature deficit disorder” (2010) because, indeed, there are no real trees in sight. If the use of digital animation undermined The Lorax’s authenticity as both an adaptation and a work of ecocinema, so too did the cross-­ promotion strategies surrounding the film. The Lorax’s commercial partnerships saw the titular character attached to products such as HP, Hilton, and Seventh Generation disposable nappies—products that were at best tenuously linked with the film’s environmental theme, and at worst, corruptions of it. Stephanie Sperber, president of partnerships and licensing at Universal, noted that the studio took care when deciding upon product tie-ins and partnerships, stating that “[o]ur partners needed to legitimately be in the environmental space… The brands and messages had to ring true to the Lorax story” (quoted in Confino 2012). Despite this apparently mindful approach, many of the partnerships weakened the film’s authenticity as an environmental text, and this misstep in transmedia branding attracted as much, if not more, critical attention than the film itself. Jo Confino, for example, exclaimed that Universal “has trampled all

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over the book’s original vision” and “is misusing the Lorax story through its 70 sponsorship deals”, concluding that “[a]t its root, what Universal has done is to industrialise and commercialise a story that seeks to warn against industrialisation and a throwaway culture” (2012). If the film invited an unflinching gaze at environmental problems, then, its paratexts drew the eyes away to the pleasures of consumption. Most notable was the film’s partnership with car brand Mazda and the use of imagery from the film in an advertising campaign for the Mazda CX-5. The advertisement depicts the car driving through a forest of Truffula Trees and being given “the Truffula Tree seal of approval” due to its fuel efficiency; the Lorax is shown smiling and nodding approvingly. The campaign also involved a costumed Lorax touring American schools promoting the Mazda brand. At such events, a reading of the original tale was followed by a talk from a Mazda representative who, in one instance, encouraged children to “persuade their parents to go to the nearest Mazda dealership for a test-drive” and described the fuel-efficient yet still petrol-­ powered CX-5 as “the kind of car we think the Lorax would like to drive” (Brown 2012). In addition to this spillage of the character from the film’s world into a commercial space, there is what may be described as an inauthentic use of character and story here, a point many critics were quick to seize upon. Ed Gillespie, co-founder of the sustainability communications agency Futerra, wrote in The Guardian that he was “floored” by the campaign’s “crass chicanery” (2012), while Ariel Schwartz pointed out acerbically that “the Lorax wouldn’t drive a car; he would probably ride a bike. Or just walk” (2012). While other environmental films  (such as James Cameron’s Avatar) have received public criticism for promotional partnerships that contradict their green themes, the outrage directed at Universal Studios over The Lorax was seemingly more intense because of the film’s status as a children’s text. This suggests that the relationship between children, film, and environmental communication can exist within a fraught space due to persistent beliefs that child audiences should be shielded from both commercialisation and the politics of environmental messaging. But there is another story to be told here, because while the Lorax appeared in the fabricated space of a Mazda commercial, he also appeared in the very real space of the global climate strikes of September 2019. The strikes, which will be discussed more fully in Chap. 7, were timed to coincide with the United Nations Youth Climate Summit and both events showcased the voices and actions of young people. A notable feature of

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this civic activism was the presence of iconic characters, images, and quotes from entertainment media and popular culture which many of the young protestors co-opted and used in their visual material and in their speeches and chants. The Lorax was there, alongside Pikachu from Pokémon and the stop-motion penguin Pingu—he was present on signs and home-made banners, and he was evoked in speeches; he helped young protestors articulate their concerns, their anger, and their power. In the coastal city of Townsville in Queensland, in the north of Australia, students held up signs adorned with the Lorax’s picture accompanied by the words, “I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees, and the trees say Stop Adani” (referring to the controversial Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, a project overseen by the Adani Group). Across the world, in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the US, a thirteen-year-old student ended his passionate speech rallying for climate action with the words “We are the Lorax”. In many ways, then, the Lorax himself as a fictional character was a participant in these events, marching alongside children who had read his story or watched him on screen. John Fiske argues that popular culture is both “industrialized” and “of the people” (1990: 23), and that often the easiest way for people to create their own cultural material is not to generate content from scratch: it is to use (or repurpose) the materials and meanings produced by the cultural industries themselves. The cultural needs of the people, writes Fiske, ensure that the “cultural commodity” is transformed into the “cultural resource”, something that can be used and remade; and popular forces “pluralize the meanings and pleasures it offers, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogeneity and coherence, raid or poach upon its terrain” (1990: 28). In the 2019 global climate strikes, the repetition of slogans stating I am/we are the Lorax shows that this odd-looking character from popular culture became both a “cultural resource” and a figure of identification for young citizens who were struggling to enact change and mobilise others, while also expressing their own identity and their own feelings of frustration, anger, and desire. The Lorax is, indeed, an activist and a personification of activism itself—as an enduring creation of literature, media, and popular culture, he is also part of the raw material, provided by media, with which young people can create their own messages and engage in their own acts of environmental communication.

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A Bridge Between Fantasy and Reality Jenny Buckland, Chief Executive of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, notes that there are “two worlds” of children’s media: one world that celebrates local texts and programmes reflecting a child’s distinctive cultural context, and another world in which “children’s media is big business”. In this second world, “producers, distributors and studios meet to finance and distribute shows that will air to millions of children around the world” and “[t]oy tie-ins are de rigueur” (2017: 15). While Buckland is speaking specifically about television here, her comment has equal relevance for children’s film and for children’s screen texts more broadly. The three films analysed in this chapter belong to Buckland’s second world, and for this reason, they have broad, even global, influence. However, it is very difficult for texts in this “second world” to engage in pro-environmental communication, promote sustainability, or contribute to the building of environmental literacies, because such texts are bound into media franchises and supported by product tie-ins: not only does the storyworld become a more complicated beast to manage, but the production of ancillary merchandise in order to encourage further consumption does not sit easily within a narrative about pro-environmental behaviour. Each of the films discussed above must also be seen in terms of adaptation, appropriation, and transmedia storytelling—the transformations and interconnections that define children’s culture. Not only are these three films adaptations of older stories, and sources of further adaptation by fans or activists, but like many children’s films they exist as part of what Marsha Kinder (1991: 40) has termed “entertainment supersystems”, and are supported by transmedia storytelling which has “become a regular practice within the children’s media industry” (Herr-Stephenson et al. 2013: 10). My analysis of The Lorax shows that transmedia extensions can sometimes undermine a text’s pro-environmental messages, especially when the brand of an entertainment media franchise is carried across products that are environmentally damaging in some way. However, the evocation of the Lorax in youth-led climate activism is a pointed reminder that children themselves are leaders in transmedia storytelling. For the child using the Lorax to protest against Adani, it perhaps did not matter that the character had previously appeared in a Mazda advertisement, because he could be easily woven into a different narrative, the cross-promotional baggage discarded. This film, therefore, while a problematic object in itself, is also a

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link in an unfolding narrative that incorporates the source text as well as these moments of real-world climate activism and appropriation. Paratexts and transmedia extensions can contradict, illuminate, or enforce the environmental messaging within a film. Communication practices beyond or outside the world of the film can do the same. Bruckner proposes that while there are problems with the representation of nature in films like Bambi and Finding Nemo, their “green aspects” nevertheless can be used to kick-start discussions with children about environmental issues and the “values, accuracies, and inaccuracies represented in the films” (2010: 202). In other words, such films can be read not as instances of environmental messaging in themselves but as links in a chain of communication that involves real-world conversations as well as transmedia narratives. As Rosenbaum and Rosenbaum put it in their review of Frozen II, the film “allows us to engage our children in discussions of climate change”, making environmental issues “hot topics at the dinner table”, and the film itself is therefore a “bridge between fantasy and reality” for children (2019). Similarly, films like The Jungle Book, which do not overtly engage with environmental themes, can activate media coverage of environmental issues by contributing to their newsworthiness. For example, a piece in National Geographic, written in response to the release of Favreau’s film, points out that many of the animals in Kipling’s original stories now face extinction and tells readers “what you should know about the real-life versions of The Jungle Book gang” (Nuwer 2016). And while we have seen in this chapter that sponsorship deals can undermine a film’s environmental messaging, as it did, spectacularly, with The Lorax, paratexts can also be used more thoughtfully to strengthen a film’s environmental messaging. At times, paratexts become a more appropriate or effective place in which to activate a direct rather than sidelong way of seeing environmental problems. Bruckner mentions “Exploring the Reef”, a short film found on the DVD release of Finding Nemo, where the impact of global warming on coral reefs is directly discussed (2010: 195). The Jungle Book, meanwhile, was released with an official Educator’s Guide that provides tips for protecting the “animals in your own backyard” (2016: 17) which range from creating wildlife-friendly habitats to simply “connect[ing] with nature” (2016: 17), as well as other resources and activities relating to water and drought, habitat destruction, and the encroachment of humans onto animal habitats. In this way, children’s films about nature may not always fall within the well-guarded (and ‘adult’) space of ecocinema, but they can nevertheless function to increase environmental knowledge and

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awareness, and at times they can provide both the raw materials for new cultural narratives about the environment and the gateway to cross-generational conversations about environmental problems. I have shown in this chapter that some children’s films can be tentatively located within the ‘ecocinema’ space, but that the impact of children’s cinema on public thought about the environment is wider than this space, with blockbuster films like Moana engaging in environmental communication through the layers of story. As Brereton points out, “storytelling can be usefully used as a proactive way of understanding, communicating and influencing others, which can become almost infinite in its long-term effects” (2018: 145). In certain children’s films, we witness the power of storytelling to create spaces where the planetary crisis (and responses to it) can be understood. But a deeper question must be asked here: to what extent do screen texts help children (re)connect with the natural world? Environmental literacy, as we have seen, involves the development of empathy and appreciation as well as knowledge and awareness (Orr 2011; McBride et al. 2013). Given the attention poured into the crafting (and the promotion) of rich on-screen depictions of nature in children’s film, it is worth asking whether such texts can play a role in the enhancement of qualities like environmental empathy or appreciation, or even, to return to Carson’s discourse, wonder and love. In animation, this issue of screen texts and their ability to distance or connect viewers with ‘real’ nature becomes more complex. With this in mind, I will turn my attention in Chap. 6 to the representation of nature and environmental issues in children’s animated films and digital worlds.

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Fritz, Alice Marianne. 2020. ‘Buy Everything’: The Model Consumer-Citizen of Disney’s Zootopia. Journal of Children and Media 14 (4): 475–491. Frozen. 2013. Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. Walt Disney Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. Frozen II. 2019. Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee. Walt Disney Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. Geisel, Theodor. 1971. The Lorax. New York: Random House. Gilbey, Ryan. 2016. Mowgli: The Heart and Troubled Soul of The Jungle Book.’ The Guardian, April 15. Accessed November 13, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/15/mowgli-­the-­heart-­and-­troubled-­soul-­of-­ the-­jungle-­book-­film-­kipling. Gillespie, Ed. 2012. Greenwash and Hamming it Up—Mazda Makes a Mess of CX-5 Advert. The Guardian, February 28. Accessed October 1, 2018. http:// www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/feb/27/mazda-­advert-­dr-­ seuss-­lorax. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately. New  York and London: New  York University Press. Haglund, David. 2012. Lou Dobbs is Silly, but The Lorax Really is Political. Slate, February 23. Accessed October 6, 2018. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/02/23/is_the_lorax_propaganda_lou_dobbs_thinks_so_and_so_ did_dr_seuss.html. Hall, Jacob. 2016. New The Jungle Book Images Offer an Astonishing Before-and-­ After Look at Two Scenes. Slash Film, April 29. Accessed November 12, 2019. https://www.slashfilm.com/544051/the-­jungle-­book-­images-­vfx/. Happy Feet. 2006. Directed by George Miller. Warner Bros, Village Roadshow Pictures, Kennedy Miller Productions, Animal Logic, and Kingdom Feature Productions. Herr-Stephenson, Becky, Meryl Alper, and Erin Reilly. 2013. T is for Transmedia: Learning Through Transmedia Play. Los Angeles and New  York: USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and Joan Ganz Cooney Centre at Sesame Workshop. Hotchkiss, Jane. 2001. The Jungle of Eden: Kipling, Wolf Boys, and the Colonial Imagination. Victorian Literature and Culture 29 (2): 435–449. Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. London and New  York: Routledge. Ice Age: The Meltdown. 2006. Directed by Carlos Saldanha. 20th Century Fox Animation and Blue Sky Studios. Ingram, David. 2012. The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-film Criticism. In Ecomedia: Key Issues, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 43–61. London and New York: Routledge. Kahn, Peter H. 2002. Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia. In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, ed. Peter Kahn and Stephen Kellert, 93–116. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

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Kapur, Jyotsna. 2005. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Keegan, Rebecca. 2016. Jungle Book Director Jon Favreau Keeps the 19th Century Kipling tone but Updates the Classic for Modern Times. LA Times, April 15. Accessed November 19, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-­et-­mn-­modernizing-­jungle-­book-­20160414-­story.html?dlvrit=95867. Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. King, Margaret J. 1996. The Audience in the Wilderness: The Disney Nature Films. Journal of Popular Film and Television 24 (2): 60–68. Kipling, Rudyard. 2006. The Jungle Book. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Accessed November 16, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/236/236-­ h/236-­h.htm. Louv, Richard. 2010. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-­ Deficit Disorder. London: Atlantic Books. Lutts, Ralph H. 1992. The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney’s Bambi and the American Vision of Nature. Forest and Conservation History 36 (4): 160–171. MacDonald, Scott. 2012. The Ecocinema Experience. In Ecomedia: Key Issues, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 17–41. London and New York: Routledge. McBride, Brooke B., C. A. Brewer, A. R. Berkowitz, and William T. Borrie. 2013. ‘Environmental Literacy, Ecological Literacy, Ecoliteracy: What do we mean and How did we get here?’ Ecosphere 4 (5): 1–20. Moana. 2016. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. Moore, Ellen Elizabeth. 2016. Green Screen or Smokescreen? Hollywood’s Messages about Nature and the Environment. Environmental Communication 10 (5): 539–555. Murphy, Patrick D. 1995. “The Whole Wide World was Scrubbed Clean”: The Andocentric Animation of Denatured Disney. In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 125–136. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Myers, Olin Eugene, and Carol D.  Saunders. 2002. Animals as Links Toward Developing Caring Relationships with the Natural World. In Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, ed. Peter Kahn and Stephen Kellert, 153–178. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. Nuwer, Rachel. 2016. How Much Do You Know About the Real Jungle Book Animals? National Geographic, April 15. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/160414-­real-­jungle-­ book-­animals-­facts-­disney-­movie-­science.

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Orr, David W. 2011. Hope is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr. Washington: Island Press. Parham, John. 2016. Green Media and Popular Culture. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Payne, David. 1995. Bambi. In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 137–147. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Prévot-Julliard, Anne-Caroline, and Romain Julliard. 2015. Historical Evidence for Nature Disconnection in a 70-year Time Series of Disney Animated Films. Public Understanding of Science 24 (6): 672–680. Princess Mononoke. 1997. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli. Rampell, Ed. 2016. Disney’s Latest Motion Picture is a Parable About Climate Change and Indigenous Rights. Earth Island Journal, December 2. Accessed May 26, 2020. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/ entry/disneys_moana_is_parable_about_climate_change/. Rawal, Sugandha. 2016. Jon Favreau Breathes New Life to Kipling Classic The Jungle Book. Business Standard, February 24. Accessed November 19, 2019. https://www.business-­standard.com/article/news-­ians/jon-­favreau-­bre…es-­ new-­life-­to-­kipling-­classic-­the-­jungle-­book-­116022400306_1.html. ReelnReel. 2016. The Jungle Book movie YouTube Marketing Success Strategy. ReelnReel, April 18. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://www.reelnreel. com/the-­jungle-­book-­movie-­youtube-­marketing-­success-­strategy/. Rosenbaum, Michael, and Matt Rosenbaum. 2019. Frozen II and Climate Change Should be Hot Topics at the Dinner Table. The Hill, December 20. Accessed May 26, 2020. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-­environment/475328-­ frozen-­ii-­and-­climate-­change-­should-­be-­hot-­topics-­at-­the-­dinner. Rust, Stephen. 2012. Hollywood and Climate Change. In Ecomedia: Key Issues, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 191–211. London and New York: Routledge. Rust, Stephen, and Salma Monami. 2012. Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves— Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies. In Ecomedia: Key Issues, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 1–13. London and New York: Routledge. Sacks, Ethan. 2012. Lou Dobbs Bashes The Lorax and Secret World of Arrietty for “Indoctrinating Liberal Agenda.” New York Daily News, July 3. Accessed October 1, 2018. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-­movies/ fox-­b usiness-­l ou-­… ld-­a rrietty-­i ndoctrinating-­c hildren-­l iberal-­a genda-­ article-­1.1026738. Schwank, Alexander, Callum James James, and Tony Micilotta. 2016. The Trees of The Jungle Book. MPC R&D, July 27. Accessed November 11, 2019. https://www.mpc-­rnd.com/the-­trees-­of-­the-­jungle-­book/. Schwartz, Ariel. 2012. The Horrible Marketing Campaign for The Lorax Just Gets Worse. Fast Company, March 12. Accessed October 13, 2018. http://www. fastcoexist.com/1679430/mazda-­takes-­its-­controversial-­lorax-­campaign-­to-­ public-­schools.

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Smith, Sarah J. 2005. Children, Cinema and Censorship: from Dracula to the Dead End Kids. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Spencer, Jane. 2010. Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-century Narrative. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (4): 469–486. SPREP. 2021. World Leaders Told: “we are not drowning, we are fighting.” Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, November 2. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.sprep.org/news/world-­leaders-­ told-­we-­are-­not-­drowning-­we-­are-­fighting. Starosielski, Nicole. 2011. “Movement That are Drawn”: A History of Environmental Animation from The Lorax to FernGully to Avatar. The International Communication Gazette 73 (1–2): 145–163. Stratton, David. 2012. Dr Seuss’ The Lorax [review]. At the Movies, March 28. Accessed October 1, 2018. http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/ s3441523.htm. Tamaira, A Mārata Ketekiri, with Dionne Fonoti. 2018. Beyond Paradise? Retelling Pacific Stories in Disney’s Moana. The Contemporary Pacific 30 (2): 297–327. The Jungle Book. 2016. Directed by Jon Favreau. Walt Disney Pictures. The Lorax. 2012. Directed by Chris Renaud. Illumination Entertainment. Trendacosta, Katharine. 2016. Reminder: Rudyard Kipling was a Racist Fuck and The Jungle Book is Imperialist Garbage. Gizmodo, April 14. Accessed November 19, 2019. https://gizmodo.com/reminder-­rudyard-­kipling-­was-­a-­racist-­fuck-­ and-­the-­jun-­1771044121. Tryon, Chuck. 2009. Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Waldman, Katy. 2016. How Disney’s New Jungle Book Subverts the Gross Colonialism of Rudyard Kipling. Slate, April 19. Accessed November 11, 2019. https://slate.com/culture/2016/04/how-­d isney-­s -­n ew-­j ungle-­b ook-­ subverts-­rudyard-­kipling-­s-­racism.html. Wall.E. 2008. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Walt Disney Pictures; Pixar Animation Studios. Whitley, David. 2012. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation: From Snow White to WALL-E. Farnham: Ashgate. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. 2010. Shifting Paradigms: From Environmentalist Films to ecocinema. In Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 43–61. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Zootopia. 2016. Directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush. Walt Disney Animation Studios.

CHAPTER 6

Young Explorers in Virtual Ecosystems: Environmental Empathy in Animated and Digital Worlds

The previous chapters demonstrated the various ways media might contribute to the development of environmental literacies in young audiences by revealing, activating, or granting access to knowledge about environmental problems and by depicting children’s efficacy as social actors in relation to the environment. In this chapter, I turn attention to an aspect of environmental literacy that I have, as yet, not fully explored: environmental sensitivity. Defined by Hungerford and Volk (1990: 261) as “an empathetic perspective toward the environment” and one of several entry-­ level variables related to pro-environmental behaviour, environmental sensitivity “consists of a complex blend of feelings, attitudes, beliefs and elements of environmental knowledge” that leads to pro-environmental action (Barbas et al. 2009: 62). Research has shown that real experiences in nature can increase children’s environmental sensitivity (Chawla 1998, 2007, 2009; Pergams and Zaradic 2006; Ives et  al. 2018). But do on-­ screen or mediated experiences count? As this book has shown, children’s experiences with nature are becoming increasingly mediated, as images of wild nature become prolific on screen while many young people are growing up in urban environments where access to ‘real’ nature is limited. In this context, Kellert (2002: 118) proposes that children’s experiences with nature can be “vicarious” or “symbolic” as well as direct. These vicarious experiences, he notes, occur

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“in the absence of actual physical contact with the natural world” and through encounters with “representations or depicted scenes of nature that sometimes are realistic but that also, depending on circumstance, can be highly symbolic, metaphorical, or stylized characterizations” (2002: 119). This depiction of the natural world through symbolic means is not new and should not be primarily associated with ‘new’ media, because it can be traced back to cave paintings and ancient myths (Kellert 2002: 120). However, the rise of print and electronic media and networked communication has led to a proliferation of these vicarious experiences and an increase in the diverse ways they might be offered and accessed. Computer-generated imagery can bring young audiences ‘close’ to nature and to wildness in an unprecedented way, and this has led Bagust to argue that “[i]n the twenty-first century any taxonomy of ‘natures’ that excludes ‘virtual ecosystems’ will surely be incomplete” (2008: 213). But do these vicarious and virtual experiences prompt a sense of nature-connectedness and build the eco-literacies required for participation in environmental action? Relatively little work has been conducted on this issue with children in mind, although many have argued, in relation to adult viewers, that mediated images of nature only serve to distance us from the natural world. In his work on wildlife documentaries, Mitman argues that such texts merely turn “nature into entertainment” (2009: 3), while Milstein points out that this viewing position invites a degree of “anthropocentric detachment” (2016: 232). Others, though, have argued that screen texts can strengthen the relationship between (adult) humans and the more-than-human world. Arendt and Matthes write that “exposure to nature documentaries primes the nature-related concepts in the memory” (2016: 461) and leads to strong nature-connectedness, or “the belief about the degree to which a person sees himself or herself as part of nature” (2016: 456). As technologies of the screen improve, leading to enhanced abilities of screen texts to represent wild nature convincingly, such texts may well invite young viewers to imagine themselves “as part of nature”, especially when a child protagonist is depicted within the text with their own strong sense of nature-connectedness. Such “vicarious” experiences, to use Kellert’s term, arguably do have a role to play in the development of children’s environmental sensitivity. Here we return to the issue of “care”, and the possibility, articulated by environmental thought leaders like Rachel Carson (and later, David Attenborough) that people will fight to protect what they care about. Each of the films analysed in the previous chapter

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can be accused of turning nature and/or environmentalism (in the case of The Lorax) into entertainment, but each can be read with equal validity as a film that expresses care for the natural world and invites young viewers into a caring position in relation to nature. The two readings do not displace each other; the films embody the tension between them. Even the act of depicting a natural setting with ‘care’ on screen can communicate that nature is worth caring about: in this sense, the sparkling, detailed representation of the ocean in Moana might instil in audiences a love for ocean and island ecosystems, both because it sparks wonder in the viewer and because it is crafted with care. Similarly, the cutting-edge representation of the (virtual) jungle and its inhabitants in The Jungle Book can be promoted as a technological marvel, but it also articulates the idea that nature is complex, beautiful, and worth attending to. The question of whether on-screen representations of nature can foster environmental sensitivity and empathy becomes more complex and difficult to answer in the context of animation, a ‘genre’ or mode of representation that, in Western cultures at least, is often associated with children (Napier 2000: 5). Animated texts are not always grounded in either reality or realism, and, as Paul Wells has observed, animation cannot achieve an “authentic representation of reality” to the same extent as live-action media because “it does not use the camera to ‘record’ reality but artificially creates and records its own” (1998: 24–25). It is also the case that different styles of animation involve different relationships with the ‘organic’ world; that is, the world grounded in real bodies and nature-scapes. A work of traditional hand-drawn animation or a text that is completely computer-generated each lack a secure origin in nature, while a text created through motion-capture has an uneasy relationship with original bodies, places, and worlds. This tension between animated text and ‘organic’ reality infuses animated representations of the more-than-human world. Evoking Pezzullo and Cox’s definition of environmental communication as “the pragmatic and constitutive modes of expression—the naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiating—of our ecological relationships with the world, including those with nonhuman systems, elements, and species” (2018: 13), it is clear that for children, in particular, animated and digital texts frequently function in this manner: children’s animated films, television programmes, and videogames are important spaces for environmental communication and often represent not just the natural world but the human/nature relationship, sometimes in playful and radical ways. In this context, much

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analytical work has been conducted on the films of Studio Ghibli and Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (see, e.g., Stibbe 2007; Thevenin 2013; Parham 2016; Cubitt 2005). Miyazaki’s films often invite reflection on the intrinsic value of nature and natural systems, or depict environmental efficacy (Thevenin 2013), and the master animator himself has admitted to “com[ing] to the point where I just can’t make a movie without addressing the problem of humanity as part of an ecosystem” (quoted in Chute 1998: 64). Chute observes that the films of Miyazaki are defined by a tension between the natural and the technological: they feature both machinery and nature in imaginative manifestations, yet they are also redolent of the notion that “the natural world may or may not be one enormous organic machine” (1998: 64). For Chute, the term “organic machine” also describes the care and precision involved in the creation of Miyazaki’s imaginary worlds. Operating within the machine that is animation itself, Chute suggests, are the “organic” qualities to Miyazaki’s work: because the famous animator shuns computer-generated imagery and “personally draws up to 70 percent of the individual frames in his movies” his films are stripped of the “high gloss of CGI” and contain “images that appear hand-crafted (a look as distinctively Japanese as the ‘organic’ surface textures of an ancient teacup” (1998: 62). This division between nature and technology informs Chute’s argument that Miyazaki’s work is “organic”; perhaps also informing his argument is the understanding that Miyazaki personally draws many of his images and thus is organically involved. However, this embodied and organic involvement of the animator in the production of a text is, today, unusual. Is it a problem, then, that many of the animated and digital representations of nature that children consume lack a grounding in the real world? Bousé asks whether wildlife documentaries “‘get’ the realities of nature” (2003: 5), but surely this question is amplified when the screen text in question is a work of animation. In Chap. 5, we caught a glimpse of virtual ecosystems and the use of digital effects to recreate wild nature in The Jungle Book. Does such digital simulation of nature epitomise what Bill McKibben sees as the “end” of nature—the replacement of true nature with something “artificial” (1989: 922)? In his reading of Bambi, David Whitley explores two possible perspectives on this issue. First, he offers a critical view, noting that the film’s unabashed play for young viewers’ emotions—rendering wild nature as disarmingly cute—may create a barrier, making it more difficult for

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viewers to understand and relate to a ‘real’ nature that has not been so carefully manicured and stage managed as spectacle. (2012: 3)

Disney’s “sentimental viewpoint”, he adds, is “difficult to reconcile with full respect for the integrity and otherness of the natural world” (2012: 3). In this sense, the animated representation of the natural world in a Disney film may distance child viewers from real nature, a simulation eclipsing the original. But, Whitley argues, Bambi also enables “a powerful empathy to be built up between the viewer and an archetypal image of nature as a form to which we are connected and owe allegiance” (2012: 3) and can therefore “attune the viewer more profoundly to significant features of wild nature” (2012: 3–4). Whitley here recognises the power of animated representations of nature to foster empathy and thereby increase the (child) viewer’s environmental sensitivity. Bruckner, in turn, argues that when it comes to the media/nature relationship, animation has a certain honesty: Animated representations can be less problematic than live action as they call attention to, rather than hide, their own staging and artificiality. Unlike spectacularized illusions of nature untouched, animated films foreground their manipulation of the nonhuman world, pointing up rather than obviating how nature is framed and produced for human visual consumption. (2010: 189)

Unlike the live-action wildlife documentary, then, animated texts draw attention to their own framing and distancing of the natural world, adding a layer of mediation to the viewer/nature relationship but also calling attention to the mediation process. Moreover, animators who seek to represent the more-than-human world are not constrained by the limits of live-action media, and this can bring authenticity and profound expressiveness to a non-human perspective. Todd also points out that because of the ease with which it can be dubbed, animation is cross-cultural and “allows for distribution and appeal to a wide variety of audiences” (2015: 251). This ability to appeal to diverse and cross-cultural audiences, along with the medium’s capacity for vivid, imaginative storytelling, makes animation a powerful force in environmental communication. In this chapter I will analyse a range of children’s texts that invite alternative ways of thinking about the role of animation and digital representation in environmental communication. My concern here is particularly

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with the capacity for screen texts to encourage environmental empathy through representations of nature and/or the relationship between human and non-human worlds, bodies, and ways of being. I acknowledge here that the animated films Wall.E and Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (alongside other Studio Ghibli works such as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds) have had deep influence as leading examples of what Starosielski calls “environmental animation” (2011), but I also acknowledge that these texts have already received much scholarly attention (Murray and Heumann 2011; Whitley 2012; Stibbe 2007; Thevenin 2013; Parham 2016; Cubitt 2005), and I turn to less-theorised examples for evidence of the capacity of children’s animated texts to reproduce environmental meanings. Through my analysis of the films Wolfwalkers (2020) and How to Train Your Dragon (2010), along with the popular videogame Minecraft, I propose that the animated, digital, and virtual experiences that constitute so much of children’s screen time today open a space for radical reconfigurations of the human/nature relationship. Such texts, I argue, use technologies of the screen to enable the environment as communicator—and because of the fantastic, speculative, playful, and boundary-­ crossing qualities of children’s digital and animated media, these texts have the capacity to negotiate meanings about nature, ignite environmental empathy, invite the viewer to consider their position in relation to the more-than-human world, and increase the saliency of a range of environmental problems.

Environmental Empathy in Wolfwalkers and How to Train Your Dragon DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon is the first in a trilogy of films that loosely adapts Cressida Cowell’s series of children’s novels about a young Viking named Hiccup. In the film, Hiccup lives in a world where humans are in perpetual conflict with the dragons that terrorise their island village. The village children are raised to believe that “a dragon will always, always, go for the kill”, as Hiccup’s teacher informs him, while his friend Astrid describes the conflict between humans and dragons as “our parents’ war”, signalling that the story is also about children inheriting a problematic relationship with the non-human world from previous generations. Desperate to gain the approval of his father, the village chief Stoick, Hiccup—who is more cerebral and less brawny

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than the other children in the village—shoots and wounds a rare Night Fury dragon. When he finds the wounded dragon in the forest, he is delighted: “I have brought down this mighty beast!” he cries, knowing that his father will finally be proud rather than ashamed of him. Thus begins the relationship between Hiccup and his soon-to-be dragon friend, Toothless. In order to attain the friendship that will drive the narrative throughout the film and across its many sequels and spin-offs, Hiccup must change his perspective, and the film attends to this with care. Over a series of scenes, dragon and child interact and their trust slowly builds. They watch and mimic one another; the dragon roars in Hiccup’s face but does not harm him. Through this exchange of gazes, gestures, and breath, their connection forms, and becomes one not of domination but of mutual respect, attentiveness, and learning: a receptive, reciprocal relationship. As I have shown in earlier chapters, there are many tales in children’s literature, media, and culture that focus on the loving relationship between child and wild creature. To a certain extent, How to Train Your Dragon builds upon this long tradition. Importantly, Hiccup and Toothless’s relationship in the film becomes more symbiotic as the narrative progresses. After Toothless is wounded by Hiccup, he is unable to fly, until Hiccup’s remorse and inventiveness lead him to create an artificial fin for the dragon’s tail. The prosthesis only works when Hiccup is flying with Toothless, leading to several of the film’s iconic scenes in which the two share the exhilaration of flight. When Hiccup is wounded at the end of the film, leading to an amputation of his leg, the bond between them is complete: the two share an identity as cripples, each with a prosthesis, but when flying together they can transcend these limitations. The flight scenes, meanwhile—which are the film’s main technical achievement and source of visual spectacle—are also moments when the human and non-human protagonists discover a new way-of-being together. The depiction of the thrill of flight, moreover, enables the viewer to fleetingly experience a more-­ than-­human existence: in these scenes, we do not simply watch Toothless, we become him. An important facet of the way this film builds a child/nature relationship is the rejection of adult knowledge and authority. Hiccup is trained to become a dragon slayer, even as he secretly builds his relationship with Toothless. At one point he is given a “Dragon Manual” by his teacher, and reads about “dragon classification”, although he quickly discovers that the manual has been written from a problematic human perspective: the many species of dragons are each described in the manual as “extremely

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dangerous”, with the added instruction to “kill on sight”. On the one hand, the Dragon Manual is a playful stand-in for Cowell’s own books, which also cultivate a fan-like interest in the various dragon species (and at times delight in the inventively gruesome ways they might kill you), but at the same time the film depicts the book as a problematic object of adult authority that imposes a forced homogeneity on the non-human world (while Cowell’s own books celebrate the wondrous diversity of non-­ human life). Hiccup soon realises that he must rewrite this knowledge system and lead the adult characters to a more harmonious relationship with the wildness around them. The film’s avoidance of verbal language in key scenes is important here. Unlike other cinematic animals, Toothless does not speak in words—he and Hiccup develop an understanding through gestures, sounds, touch, and physical closeness. Avoidance of verbal language becomes a means of circumventing adult authority (as cemented in the written words of the Dragon Manual). Thus, when trying to convince his friend Astrid that Toothless is not a threat, Hiccup tells her “I won’t speak—just let me show you”, words which trigger another spectacular and largely wordless depiction of flight. Uniquely for a children’s film and a Hollywood production, the most important scenes in the film lack dialogue, and this privileges the animal’s mode of communication, allowing ‘wild nature’ to ‘speak’ through movement and non-verbal expression. We can return here to the question of whether an animated film in the fantasy genre, which contains few ‘real’ animals and no ‘real’ nature, can cultivate a sense of joy and wonder that informs children’s sense of nature-­ connectedness. Superficially, How to Train Your Dragon is designed to entertain children and adapts a successful series of novels as a risk-free strategy, building its viewership on a pre-existing fan community, as do many screen adaptations (O’Flynn 2013: 180). It is also part of a highly successful franchise that encompasses toys and other product tie-ins as well as two sequels, a number of television spin-offs, videogames, and graphic novels. While the critical reception of the initial film was largely positive, some critics described the film dismissively as “Avatar for simpletons” (Smith 2010), undermining its ability to engage in authentic environmental messaging—although arguably, such dismissive critical readings of children’s media are informed by a troublesome perception of the child audience as intellectually and emotionally inferior. Like The Jungle Book, meanwhile, How to Train Your Dragon is preoccupied with its technical achievements as a digitally animated text, and in this sense, the primary

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story it tells is one of human mastery over the natural world through visual reproduction. Nevertheless, the film contributes to what Kellert (2002) has termed the “emotional salience” of nature, prompting an affective response to the non-human world. Kellert does not dismiss the role of fantasy stories and mediated experiences in the development of such an emotional response. He writes: Nature’s emotional salience for the child also derives from its role in fantasy and imagination as much as from direct, literal, or tactile contacts. Nature is profoundly populated with creatures and habitats occurring in the realm of children’s stories, myths, fables, tales, and dreams. These encounters provide a multitude of affective opportunities for engagement, discovery, creativity, joy, wonder, revelation, adventure, surprise, and more. (2002: 128)

Certainly, How to Train Your Dragon prompts feelings of delight, awe, and excitement in relation to the diverse species of dragons and their complex interactions with the human characters. The film and its sequels display elements of “biophilia” (Wilson 1986) with their images of colourful, teeming dragon colonies or the protagonist soaring above the clouds on his dragon’s back. These filmic representations of a world that is wild and yet also ‘close’ to human existence may well inform the child viewer’s “affective response” to nature, especially when we consider the ability of that child viewer to build connections between fantasy and reality—particularly through childhood play, where characters from media and literature might mingle with real-life scenarios, props, and places (see Jenkins 1997: 32–33). Kellert does remind us that “a natural world of imagination and vicarious experience can be emotionally dysfunctional if not balanced by contact with the actual and real of ordinary and everyday life” (2002: 128). Meanwhile, Killingsworth, writing about the “ethical duty” of environmental communication, names vicarious experiences as a problem: he argues that the human tendency to “forget where we actually are, to live virtually or vicariously, to lose one’s connections to other people and the natural habitat” undermines society’s capacity to engage with environmental problems (2007: 59). Seen from this perspective, media representations of biological richness such as those we find in How to Train Your Dragon contribute to the ‘forgetting’ of nature and environmental problems rather than the ‘remembering’ of them. Problematically, too, How to Train Your Dragon presents a visual rhetoric of excess, in the same way as

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films in the Jurassic Park franchise, assuaging concerns about biodiversity loss by focusing instead on nature’s abundance (see Heise 2003; Mitchell 1998; Bianchi 2019). But if, as Killingsworth argues, language can be used “to restore the connection to the lifeworld” (2007: 60), might we use media representations to do the same? Can an animated film that invites viewers to lose themselves in a virtual natural world also help those same viewers remember their connection to the real natural world? Further research into children’s reception of such films—which is beyond the scope of this book—may allow these questions to be fully answered, but we can also consider the invitational and representational strategies at work in the film and its positioning of the young audience. What I propose here is that the “training” that occurs in How to Train Your Dragon involves the young audience being invited to respond with a range of emotions to the more-than-human world. Equally important is the mode of address that constructs young audiences as ‘eco-literate’ viewers who can, in David Orr’s words, “observe nature with insight” and are moved by “the sense of wonder, the sheer delight in being alive in a beautiful, mysterious, bountiful world” (2011: 252). A similar use of narrative and imagery to invite a rethinking of the human/nature relationship and the observing of nature “with insight” can be found in Wolfwalkers, a critically acclaimed 2020 film produced by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon. Set in Kilkenny in 1650 and openly exploring themes of animal rights, human transformation, and empathy, Wolfwalkers tells the story of a human girl, Robyn, daughter of a hunter, who is forced to see the world from an animal’s perspective when she befriends, and ultimately becomes, a “wolfwalker”: a creature whose spirit takes the form of a wolf during sleep. Like How to Train Your Dragon, Wolfwalkers depicts a conflict between human and non-human worlds, with visual representation underpinning this narrative tension: the town of Kilkenny is grey and drab, depicted using straight lines and sharp angles, while the surrounding forest is bathed in warm, golden-red colours and depicted using circular patterns. These visual motifs also inform the representation of the characters. The Lord Protector, human figure of authority within the town, is square-shouldered and angular-faced, while the leader of the wolfwalkers, Moll, is overwhelmingly round, with a curvaceous figure and a head full of sweeping, wavy hair; she is often seen encircling her child, Mebh, while the wolf pack, in turn, encircles the pair. Wolfwalkers addresses child viewers through its hand-drawn animation style, its child protagonists, and its charming narrative of a friendship

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between two girls. Nevertheless, it is unflinching in its depiction of a strange and wild natural world, pointedly avoiding any ‘Disneyfication’ of nature. The forest is both beautiful and fierce, full of thorny thickets, deep shadows, tooth-like rocks, and snarling wolves. Even more vicious is the film’s unflinching depiction of human aggression towards nature. The intrusion of humans into the non-human world is swiftly depicted in the opening scene, where we see an axe raised against the cloudy sky, rushing through the air to strike a tree trunk; birds fly from the branches, startled by this act of violence. The Lord Protector embodies this aggression. He is keen to see the wolves removed from the forest so that the woodcutters can fell the trees, and his dialogue is punctuated with exclamations such as “This wild land must be civilised!” and “What cannot be tamed must be destroyed!”. Throughout the film, wolves are attacked, chained, threatened, and abused by humans. With these accumulating depictions of human aggression, culminating in the near-fatal wounding of the mother wolfwalker and a vicious battle between the Lord Protector and Robyn’s father, the film also disrupts the idea that children’s on-screen depictions of nature should be sweetly entertaining but not upsetting. The wolf has long been a central figure in environmental communication, one that helps us make sense of our relationships with nature (Pezzullo and Cox 2018: 19), and, since the writings of Aldo Leopold in the 1940s, one that has expedited the human understanding of keystone species in the ecosystem. As Corbett notes, wolves are a “shorthand” for environmental issues, often used by environmental groups to “represent pristine places in need of protection” (2006: 180)—their prevalence in children’s stories reminds us of their status as a point of overlap between children’s culture and the more ‘formal’ or ‘obvious’ practices of environmental communication such as those undertaken by environmental organisations. In Wolfwalkers, the symbolic power of this animal—which is also significant in the context of Irish folklore—is activated, and wolves come to represent the monstrous yet vulnerable aspects of nature. Importantly, the wolves in this story do not have to lose their monstrosity before the human child can befriend them. Instead, the story of Robyn’s friendship with Mebh, the young wolfwalker girl, is primarily a narrative about empathy that rests upon the human capacity to develop understanding and respect for the non-human other. At the beginning of the film, Robyn performs her human/hunter identity as she parades with a crossbow, firing an arrow expertly into a poster offering a five-pound reward for a dead wolf, eager to impress her hunter father. Encased within the human world,

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Robyn does not and cannot understand nature: we see her first within her room, then within the walled city, and later within the castle. Her emergence into the forest is an awakening that coincides with her encounter with Mebh, who appears as a human girl with wild attributes: she has a mountain of untamed red hair; she scurries about like an animal, snarling and snapping and often bearing her sharp teeth; she frequently proclaims that she can “smell” Robyn or that something, or someone, “stinks”. The challenge she poses to Robyn’s English refinement and bearing also allows the film to engage in a deconstruction of the gender politics that see Robyn forced into a life behind city walls, scrubbing pots in the scullery and showing manners in the fear that if she does not, manners (in the Lord Protector’s words) will be “put on her”. As with How to Train Your Dragon, the film hinges on the scenes that depict contact and developing friendship between Robyn, the human girl, and Mebh, the non-human other. While both characters are constrained, to a certain degree, by the adult rules of their respective worlds, the film also depicts childhood as a privileged space that the two girls share and that involves a crossing of the boundaries that separate humans from non-­ humans. When they meet in the forest, Robyn and Mebh begin to act neither like animals nor like adult humans, but like children, oscillating between playfulness, aggression, annoyance, and delight. Later, Mebh’s bite transforms Robyn into a wolfwalker, allowing her to experience a transformed state of being that frees her mind and body from the trappings of human ideology: manners can no longer be “put” on her, and her body is no longer the property of powerful men. At key points in the film we see the spirit-forms of the two girls, depicted on screen as golden, swirling shapes, slipping between wolf and human states in a visual depiction of dis/embodied fluidity and metamorphosis that plays upon what Susan Napier has termed the “otherness” of animation—that distinctive quality that makes animation not like live-action film and television, discernible particularly in the way animated bodies can move and perform in a different manner to their live-action counterparts (2000: 236). What Wolfwalkers shows us, then, is the degree to which the theme of bodily transformation—a common theme in children’s stories, but less so in adult or mainstream culture—can reshape and reorient our perceptions of the non-human world, thus constructing a viewing position defined by empathy. We have already seen in previous chapters that in children’s culture there is space for more slippage, more movement, around the human/ animal boundary: thus non-human animals can be ‘sources’ in children’s

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news, or protagonists in children’s film and television, leading, at times (although not always), to radical new perspectives on environmental themes. In other words, there is more space in children’s culture for challenges to be posed to the certainty that humans are separate from non-­ human animals and that both animals and nature are resources for superior humans to draw on. As Jacques reminds us, children’s literature, culture, and media are populated by bodies that slip between states from human to animal to other: By imagining ‘being’ as operating beyond bodily or environmental constraint, children’s fiction, in its attempts to address young readers, can offer sophisticated interventions into debates about what it means to be human or non-human and offer ethical imaginings of a ‘posthuman’ world. (2014: 5)

In this way, Jacques argues, children’s stories “offer potentially radical destabilizations of hierarchies of being” (2014: 5), and we might add that children’s fiction is populated by what Donna Haraway terms “boundary creatures” (2000), beings and bodies that challenge established modes of human and non-human existence. The very sense of play in children’s stories that might be seen as antithetical to ‘serious’ discussions about the environment can be essential at a time when root metaphors must be dug up and exposed and deep cultural narratives must be challenged and rewritten. The figure of the ‘monster’ allows for exactly this sort of play and disruption, all the more so within the space of animation, where the monstrous body can move and transform in ways that defy the laws of reality. While Wolfwalkers is not a horror story, it borrows from the horror genre the trope of the monster, who “comes to represent the disintegration or de-stabilisation of any one dominant perception or understanding of what it is to be human” (Wells 2000: 9). Robin Wood’s famous declaration that in horror, “normality is threatened by the Monster” (2002: 31), is applicable to Wolfwalkers where the changeable state of the titular characters allows for a productive rewriting of the ‘normal’ human/nature relationship. This is performed in a memorable scene in which Mebh and her mother embrace, the girl in human form and the mother as a wolf, and we see above them the swirling golden representations of their other selves—the wolf girl and the human mother. In many ways, the ideal world depicted in Wolfwalkers—the world in which the characters find themselves at the conclusion, when all barriers have been broken down—is a realisation of Haraway’s “Chthulucene”, a

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time in which humans along with non-human species are the main actors in the Earth’s story and “making kin” is a necessary mode of communication and interaction between species (2016). But if the film offers this narrative to its young audience, it also, significantly, uses its status as an animated text to open a way of seeing that disrupts the authority of the human gaze. One of the film’s primary technical achievements is its depiction of “wolfvision”, the production team’s term for the way of seeing that Robyn adopts when in wolf form. As Robyn moves through the forest as a wolf, the animation style changes: the lines become less clear, and pencil sketches are used to signify a sense of flow and fluidity. Swirls of colour and a rush of light dominate as Robyn runs joyfully with the wolf pack, and phosphorescent colour is used to depict the wolf’s sense of smell and sound, displacing the clarity and primacy of vision in a nevertheless visual communication of the animal’s sensory perception. A feature of the text that received much attention in the film’s critical reception (see, e.g., Tangcay 2021; Desowitz 2020; The Hollywood Reporter 2021), “wolfvision” is described by director Tomm Moore as “an attempt to show how the world appears to wolves, with a limited palette but heightened colors and expressive styles for scents and sounds” (quoted in Desowitz 2020). When wolfvision is activated, the animation style becomes more three-­ dimensional and less static: we might describe this as a ‘wilder’, less ‘tamed’ style of animation than that used to depict the town and its human inhabitants—and certainly, a style of animation (and a way of seeing) that young audiences are likely to be less familiar with. If How to Train Your Dragon primarily invites young viewers to see non-human nature and thus increases nature’s “emotional salience” (Kellert 2002: 128), Wolfwalkers uses its power as an animated text to invite young viewers into a non-human way of seeing, enabling the audience to move through the imaginary world as a non-human creature and activating a new perspective on environmental problems such as hunting, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Nevertheless, there are notable similarities between these two films and their patterns of representation in relation to the more-than-human world. In both texts, the child is an intermediary between adults and wild nature: the child can move between the human and non-human worlds, and each film tells its audience that the child’s perspective is valuable because it can disrupt the rigid authority over nature enacted by the adult. While Wolfwalkers more fully embraces an alternative way of seeing, both Hiccup and Robyn are boundary creatures, with Hiccup’s disability (his amputated leg) depicted as a strength that allows greater closeness to the animal

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world, rather than as an impediment. Neither Hiccup nor Robyn, meanwhile (nor their non-human friends, Toothless and Mebh), displays curiosity about nature as their primary character trait—instead, they are driven at times by compassion, at times by anger or rebelliousness; in this way the films reject the image of the ‘curious child’ (discussed in Chap. 4) and also position the child as more than a viewer of nature, particularly by foregrounding emotional responses to human/nature conflict, including rage and a desire for freedom from adult constraints. Indeed, over the multitextual narrative of the How to Train Your Dragon storyworld, Hiccup is depicted as an activist, leading a group of young characters who rebel against the ways-of-being laid out by previous generations. Love, too, is important in both films, and the child’s ability to feel and express deep, boundless love for animal kind is used in each film as a communication tool, while animation is used to represent wild nature in a way that is vibrant and abundant, filling the screen. We have seen in earlier chapters that the imagined “nature deficit disorder” is often accompanied by claims that nature has vanished from children’s literature and culture (Louv 2010: 33; Bekoff 2012; Williams et al. 2012); however, the two films analysed here show that natural landscapes and wild creatures continue to be present in children’s media and that often this ‘presence’ leads to new perspectives on the human/nature relationship. While made primarily for children, both films display what Pezzullo and Cox refer to as the constitutive aspect of environmental communication, which entails “verbal and non-verbal modes of interaction that shape, orient, and negotiate meanings, values, and relationships” and “invites a particular perspective, evokes certain beliefs and feelings (and not others), fosters particular ways of relating to others, and thus creates palpable feelings that may move us” (2018: 13). It is through this creation or evocation of “palpable feelings”, rather than through the imparting of knowledge about environmental problems, that the films contribute to environmental literacy. In the previous chapter, I argued that the transmedia elements surrounding a text can play a significant role in illuminating (or undermining) its environmental messages. With this in mind, it is worth pointing out that both films are underpinned by an environmental ethic that is made visible during promotional interviews and other paratexts. For example, Wolfwalkers director Tomm Moore, in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter, draws attention to his film’s environmental themes by stating that “Nature isn’t something for us to decide whether we want to protect or not” (quoted in The Hollywood Reporter 2021). This

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promotional piece also draws attention to the fact that the main character Robyn, who has a sharp-featured face and wears her blond hair in a braid, is modelled on young environmentalist Greta Thunberg (The Hollywood Reporter 2021). The real-world environmental resonance of How to Train Your Dragon, in turn, is built into Cowell’s novels, which revel in the high biodiversity of an imagined world populated by dragons of many species. Cowell openly uses the dragons as metaphors for biodiversity in the ‘real’ world, and in the prologue to her book The (In)Complete Book of Dragons, which catalogues the various dragon species that populate her storyworld, she writes: Long ago, the world was full of dragons. Imagine them wheeling in the skies, hopping through the grasses, lighting up the caves, swimming slow and silent through the seas… Look around you at your own world now. You may not see dragons, but notice the numberless quantities of species that we have in our woods, in the air, in the mountains, in the skies. The proud lion, the mighty elephant, the seals, the birds, the thousands of types of beetle… Take care, dear reader, that we are looking after the boundless wonder of our world. (Cowell 2014)

Such statements, and the embedding of an environmental politics into these works of children’s fiction, position readers as social actors in relation to the non-human world, as do the textual narratives of child empowerment in the face of abusive or incompetent adults. The ease with which such texts are promoted as ‘environmental’, meanwhile, demonstrates the degree to which children’s culture is considered a legitimate space in which environmental issues can be explored—and the degree to which a desirable children’s story is considered, in the twenty-first century, to be one that incorporates rather than avoiding difficult environmental themes.

“Peace with Nature”? Virtual Ecosystems in Minecraft Thus far, this chapter has demonstrated that visual and thematic depictions of natural wildness can creep into the animated and digitally created spaces of children’s screen media. What I have attempted to show here is that such texts contribute to the production of meaning about the environment and that if we dismiss them as mere simulations (or worse, replacements) of ‘real’ nature, we fail to recognise the productive power of

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fantasy as a tool for engaging young audiences—or the ability of young audiences to make connections between real and virtual worlds—or, indeed, the way animated or digital texts might either perpetuate or disrupt anthropocentric ways of viewing the natural world, even when no real ‘nature’ is involved in their production. I would now like to consider whether another type of ‘digital text’ or ‘virtual ecosystem’—the videogame Minecraft—shares this capacity to represent the human/nature relationship in surprising and/or complex ways. Created by Swedish developer Mojang Studios, Minecraft is one of the bestselling videogames in history and has vigorously engaged the popular imagination since its release in 2009 (Garrelts 2014: 1). A sandbox-style game, allowing the player freedom to explore its world and create (or destroy) various structures, Minecraft requires the player to extract and work with raw materials, represented as three-dimensional blocks. Players can choose to play in one of two modes: survival (in which they must attend to their own health and fight non-player characters or ‘mobs’) and creative (in which their survival is not threatened and resources are unlimited, allowing for more emphasis on exploration and construction). Minecraft is an extraordinarily popular game with children (Mavoa et al. 2018) as well as an important teaching tool: through the learning platform Minecraft: Education Edition the game has been used in classrooms to teach subjects across history, the arts, and the sciences. The subject of extensive scholarly research across its relatively short life, Minecraft has also been found to offer children rich opportunities for social interaction and identity construction (Dezuanni et al. 2015). There are a plethora of videogames that seek to cultivate environmental literacies and/or that engage in spectacular representations of the more-­ than-­human world. Chang and Parham observe that “some games may help us play our way to ecological consciousness (of co-existence with other species or of human society’s ecological impact) or, even better, move us to acts of environmental responsibility” (2017: 14), while Bianchi notes that digital games can “make arguments about nature, the environment, and ecologies” and “cultivate environmental awareness” (2019: 16). Fletcher, exploring the use of digital games in the promotion of conservation efforts, contends that the “virtual nature experiences offered by DGs can actually inspire more affective commitment to environmental causes than the direct experiences conservationists commonly advocate” (2017: 154). This in itself, together with the popularity of games amongst children (Picton et al. 2020; IGEA 2020; Weustink 2021), demonstrates

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that videogames have an important role to play in mediating the child/ nature relationship and in encouraging an affective response to nature. More overtly, a range of videogames have been used to teach audiences of all ages about environmental issues like climate change (Ouariachi et al. 2017; Wu and Lee 2015). However, Minecraft is not usually considered to be one of these ‘green games’ and is not a space within which we might expect to find pro-environmental messages, although the game certainly engages in environmental communication by inviting players to co-­ produce meanings about the natural world. A player in the virtual world of Minecraft will encounter various biomes, each with natural features such as mountains, plains, lakes, rivers, and caves. Elements of the natural world, consisting primarily of stone, vegetation, water, lava, and various ores, are depicted using blocks—this both limits the ability to authentically represent the natural world and renders such representation of nature a desirable challenge for the game’s designers. Significantly, though, as its name suggests, the key task in Minecraft is to extract minerals from the ground. As a sandbox game, Minecraft invites player engagement that takes a multiplicity of forms, but its fundamental principle cannot be avoided: material must be ‘mined’ by the human player, whose success—and sometimes, survival—depends upon extracting resources from the Earth. These resources are, seemingly, limitless and the game thus obscures environmental problems relating to extractive industries, perpetuating an instrumental view of nature. Dooghan describes Minecraft as “a game about work” (2019: 67) in which players, “beset by the literal forces of darkness, must exercise their mastery over nature to produce utopia” (2019: 68). He argues that the game represents “the physical and cultural violence of territorial expansion as a pleasurable challenge” (2019: 71). Rivera Dundas agrees, noting that nature is depicted in the game as “an agent to work against” which “because of its hostility… deserves to be cultivated and mastered”, adding that “Minecraft necessitates a controlling attitude toward its physical spaces and transforms the landscape into raw material” (2017: 125). To a certain degree, then, the game coaxes children into a position of dominance over and aggression towards nature. However, it can also be argued that the very act of ‘play’ in Minecraft dismantles boundaries between nature and technology. In this vein, Bohunicky describes Minecraft as an “ecologically oriented digital game” that is primarily about “surviving with and within nature” (2014: 221), observing that the player is “embedded” in the ecosystem (2014: 225).

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It is significant, then, that Minecraft has been used in formal educational settings to teach children about the natural world. Short, for example, proposes that Minecraft’s “strongest application” in education lies in the field of ecology, observing that the game itself has a “functioning ecology” (2012: 55) and that its biomes are “climatically and geographically” similar to those on Earth (2012: 56). In 2021, Minecraft: Education Edition introduced a Global Build Challenge inviting school-aged learners to “[e]xplore how we can achieve sustainable lifestyles” and “[a]pply knowledge and understanding by building a sustainable place to live that represents new and innovative thinking” (Minecraft Education Edition 2021). To participate in the challenge, students must learn about and discuss sustainable development before undertaking a Minecraft activity in the specially designed “Peace with Nature” world, where they must collaboratively build a sustainable community. The World Wildlife Fund has also partnered with Minecraft to use the Education Edition as a tool to teach children about conservation. These formal learning applications are accompanied by a multitude of informal learning opportunities. To offer a first-hand and anecdotal example, my own children recently pointed out a birch tree when we were walking together in a local public garden—when I expressed surprise that they could identify the tree, they told me they did so using knowledge gained in Minecraft, where they had learned about the tree’s foliage colours and the unique qualities of its wood. As well as a variety of trees, young explorers in the virtual world of Minecraft encounter a multiplicity of animal species, from polar bears to bees to axolotls. With each major update since the game’s release in 2009, more animals are added, enriching the biodiversity of the digital ecosystem—indeed, new animals are often a heavily promoted feature of a forthcoming update. At the time of writing, the next themed update (due for release in 2022) is known as “The Wild Update” and introduces frogs and fireflies as new animal ‘mobs’ along with mangrove swamps as a new biome. In a live discussion promoting the Wild Update (Minecraft Live 2021), gameplay designer Agnes Larsson describes her intention to “celebrate the wilderness of Minecraft” while the audience is teased with concept art showing vibrant jungle-scapes overflowing with greenery and moonlit mangrove swamps lush with vines. In the same discussion, lead storyteller Lydia Winters recalls playing with mangrove propagules as a child and expresses excitement over seeing them depicted in Minecraft—a seemingly deliberate activation of connections between virtual and real worlds in order to bring authenticity to the game’s representation of

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nature—while designer Cory Scheviak speaks about the importance of mangrove trees in real-world ecosystems, particularly in relation to climate change. Scheviak adds that the fireflies help to make the virtual world “come to life” and create a sense “that there is life all around you”, recalling the many times he stopped to watch the sunset in the game’s (virtual) mangrove forest, and thus encoding into the game an appreciation of nature and the pleasures of dwelling in natural spaces. Here, the representation of nature is both an enjoyable challenge for these game designers and a pleasure offered to players, who are invited, like the designers themselves, to incorporate an appreciation of digital nature into their gameplay. Interestingly, the designers here address their audiences as environmentally literate players who can appreciate the wonders of being-in-nature, even while proffering the pleasures of digital nature as part of the gaming experience. Perhaps strategically, such ‘official’ readings of the Minecraft text de-emphasise the game’s celebration of extractive industry practices, inviting instead a valuing of the natural world and a being-with-nature that seems at odds with the game’s digital status. They also obscure the fact that Minecraft has a large carbon footprint and has been identified as the “most polluting” game of all time (SaveOnEnergy 2019). Games are complex texts because any in-text environmental messages are contradicted by the damaging ecological impact of this vast media industry (Parham 2016: 205). These tensions can be resolved, complicated, revealed, or obscured by paratexts and by the act of play itself. To a certain degree, the sense of play invited by Minecraft—making, destroying, exploring, mucking around—mirrors the way children play in nature. At the same time, the popularity of the game along with the seemingly addictive quality of its gameplay has led to adult concerns about the game as an impediment to children’s real nature play (Mavoa et al. 2017). Meanwhile, organisations promoting children’s outdoor play have capitalised on the popularity of Minecraft to create guides for engaging in Minecraft-style games and activities outside, in the “real world” (e.g., The Woodland Classroom 2019; Miller and Scott 2016). This indicates a level of concern amongst adults over the game’s simulation of nature play, but it also indicates that Minecraft is not antithetical to ‘real’ nature play and that there are multiple points of intersection between virtual and real practices relating to the game. Moreover, in addition to the ‘official’ reading of Minecraft as a text in which “wilderness” can be “celebrated”, a myriad of ‘unofficial’ readings offer other possible reconfigurations of the human/ nature relationship within the space of the game. Importantly, Minecraft

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users can modify the game and share their alterations, and this sense of community and collaboration has contributed to the game’s success (Garrelts 2014: 1). Community-built modpacks allow players to experience the game in specific ways, such as the ‘Peace of Mind’ modpack which reduces the game’s aggressive features and enables the player to create a farm, or the ‘Botania’ mod, which enables players to create machines powered entirely by plants. These exemplify Bohunicky’s suggestion that modders can “actively introduce alternative content that re-­ writes (but also re-enforces) destructive and harmful representations” in videogames (2017: 76). Perhaps the most spectacular example of such ‘rewriting’ comes in the form of a mod, created at the Stockholm Green Hackathon in 2011, that tracks in-game carbon emissions, using real data from the IPCC; as the carbon emissions accumulate, the environment is represented as polluted through a darkening of the skies. This particular mod invites player reflection on their ecological impact—and, while burning material emits carbon, planting trees reduces the emissions, so that, as the mod’s creator put it, “[a]fter a long day of mining and smelting, you’ll have to go plant a few trees to keep the weather nice” (Smith 2011). In this case, the mod rewrites the game’s environmental representations to emphasise balance and the consequences of human activity. Minecraft is therefore a “producerly” text, to use John Fiske’s term (1989). Building on Roland Barthes’ notion of “readerly” and “writerly” texts, Fiske argues that a producerly text offers itself up to popular production… it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them. (1989: 104)

Shira Chess points out that many videogames “neatly fit” this category, because they provide spaces for interpretations, re-interpretations, and multiple understandings. It is the holes of narrative that exist in video games, the places where narrative is replaced by user agency and action, in which the player’s thoughts and belief system are able become an inherent part of game play. (2012: 87)

The producerly aspect of videogames has important ramifications when it comes to environmental communication and the representation of

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nature, for videogames without explicit environmental meanings can be reworked by players in a way that allows the natural world to ‘speak’. Even Grand Theft Auto 5, a game associated in the popular imagination with violence, crime, misogyny, and a thoroughly urban setting, inspired a fan-­ made wildlife documentary that collated its images of lush nature (Hudson 2015)—aspects of the text that were otherwise obscured by the focus on human action. Minecraft, in turn, literally offers players the building blocks through which to create varied worlds, experiences, and modes of being. The degree to which the natural world is obscured or made present, then, is very much in the hands of the player. We see this power to ‘surface’ meanings about the natural world enacted by the Minecraft YouTuber MumboJumbo, a member of the popular HermitCraft ‘Let’s Play’ server. The ‘Let’s Play’ genre of online videos documents an individual player’s subjective experience with a game, usually manifesting in live or edited gameplay coupled with entertaining audio commentary. They are a curation of player identity and meaning-making: as Nguyen (2016) observes, “Let’s Plays demonstrate how players perform processes of meaning-making with video games while they play” and the videos “stake claims in the interpretation of cultural texts and media, as Let’s Players offer their individualized experiences of playing for circulation, consumption, and discussion by fan communities”. HermitCraft is a private server but the players regularly upload their Let’s Play videos to YouTube and Twitch, and in Season 8 (2021) MumboJumbo announced his intention to play Minecraft with a “peace, love, and plants” approach: he vows not to kill anything deliberately, replants every tree that he cuts down, builds his own vegetable garden, and creates a shop called “Harmless Harvests” which sells objects that have been farmed without killing. With tongue firmly in cheek, MumboJumbo here performs an ecological identity—in other words, he performs his virtual self in terms of its relationship with and impact on the virtual natural world in which he is embedded. This (fleeting) performance of sustainable living is not ‘normal’ in-game behaviour, and it is easy for the player here to snap back to the usual practices of mining (and, eventually, killing). Nevertheless, this example is noteworthy because of the incorporation of environmental virtue ethics into virtual world play. MumboJumbo’s performance of the “peace, love and plants” lifestyle contains glimmers of ecopiety, which Taylor (2019: 3) describes as “contemporary practices of environmental (or ‘green’) virtue, through daily, voluntary works of duty and obligation” which “evoke an

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idyllic harmonial model of proper relations cultivated between humans and the more-than-human earth”. Like the game itself, Minecraft YouTubers are incredibly popular with children, producing paratexts that become tools for young audiences as they engage in sense-making practices within and around the game itself. MumboJumbo’s “peace, love and plants” approach to gameplay demonstrates how paratexts might draw out potential (or even hidden) environmental narratives in texts; more spectacularly, this is an example of aberrant decoding (Eco 1984; Hartley 2011: 3)—a green reading of a game about mining. Significantly, though, YouTubers like MumboJumbo are also using Minecraft as a space for play: they are modelling a particular way of playing for children (who are part of their audience), and at the same time, they are becoming childlike and replicating children’s play as they engage with the game. As Jackie Marsh reminds us, play—as a facet of childhood and the primary means by which children engage with virtual worlds—is “an activity which is complex, multi-faceted and context-dependent” (2010: 24). In the case of Minecraft, ‘play’ can involve experimenting with different identities—as enacted by MumboJumbo, environmental sustainability is an identity that can be worn within the game but easily discarded. ‘Play’ also means negotiating and building a relationship with the world around you, and thus its importance to the production of meaning about the environment should not be overlooked. Through play, Bianchi writes, the players of videogames “configure their experiences of games through their unique values” and can “identify specific ecological or environmental values, practice them, and even challenge them during gameplay” (2019: 18–19). In many ways, what MumboJumbo provides here is a repeatable action that children can take into both virtual and real ‘natural’ worlds—a gesture of peace towards living things, and practices that allow an individual to achieve at least a momentary sense of harmony with nature. These videos also demonstrate that it is possible to play this game in a way that takes into account the environmental consequences of one’s behaviour, and that players may use virtual worlds like Minecraft to enact and construct ecological identities. Minecraft exemplifies the entanglement of communication technologies, nature, and human desires to capture and explore the natural world, as well as the way digital technologies mediate the relationship between humans and non-human nature. When we consider the promotion of “The Wild Update”, discussed above, we can certainly recognise that there is a contradiction between the awe expressed by the designers

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towards (digital) nature and the practices at the heart of the game, which involve the extraction of resources for individual gain. That the Minecraft designers can introduce, and celebrate, a new set of animal and plant species with each ‘update’ obscures the simple fact that biodiversity is decreasing due to the impact of extractive industries. This in turn suggests that the introduction of new species to the game is a means of gaining more mastery over nature through digital representation, rather than a real expression of respect for the more-than-human world. However, the collaborative and ever-changing nature of the Minecraft ‘text’ means that players can create and share their own Minecraft narratives in ways that resist the expected reading—they are not constrained by the text, and uniquely, games like Minecraft enable the child to better understand their own actions in relation to the environment—for where else is a child able to make decisions about resources, or create their own (un)sustainable practices? What we can conclude here is that virtual worlds and videogames like Minecraft play a role in orienting children towards nature, but that their influence is not easy to categorise—certainly, it is not as simple as stating that virtual worlds and videogames have a ‘negative effect’ on children’s relationship with nature, either by drawing them away from ‘real’ nature and stealing their ‘green time’ or by representing nature as a resource to be tapped for personal gain (see Chap. 2). What is clear is that there are important opportunities here for educators to foster critical analysis skills (and media literacies) as well as using Minecraft to teach subjects like biology or geology. In other words, rather than a dismissal of virtual and digital screen-based experiences as a counterforce or impediment to the development of children’s environmental sensitivity, or a simplistic celebration of these texts as tool for the building of environmental knowledge, there is need for more interrogation of such texts to illuminate their capacity to construct and represent both the natural world and the human/ nature relationship.

Media and Environmental Literacies, Revisited In this chapter, I am proposing that media’s role in the cultivation of children’s environmental literacies extends beyond the provision of knowledge about the more-than-human world, and beyond the making visible of environmental problems. I am acknowledging here that environmental literacy has affective dimensions. To be ecologically or environmentally literate involves an emotional awareness of environmental problems, a sense of care for the non-human world, the ability to feel loss, and the

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ability to recognise the consequences of one’s actions. Screen texts can create pathways to these literacies when they depict affinity for the non-­ human world or when they otherwise represent diverse ways of feeling about, responding to, and being-with-nature. When representing nature in terms of wonder, though, screen texts can obscure other ways of becoming environmentally literate by inviting the viewer to seat themselves in wonder alone. The anecdote about the Minecraft designer who stops and watches the virtual sunset within the game, and encourages players to do the same, epitomises a viewing position that exudes ‘wonder’ but lacks critical engagement. Meanwhile, Minecraft asks players to work with and play with nature (often by extracting useful elements from it), and it is perhaps impossible for the game to overcome this textual emphasis on nature as a ‘plaything’. Certainly, there are problems with the reproduction of nature as on-screen entertainment, just as there are problems with the articulation of utilitarian views of nature within the texts that children consume. At times, both these problems are exacerbated by promotional paratexts that render a text’s depiction of nature as a technological achievement to be marvelled at, offering pleasure in both the viewing of nature and the mastery over nature that comes through understanding how these on-screen depictions were achieved. Even Wolfwalkers, which invests more heavily in the cultivation of environmental empathy than the other texts under scrutiny here, also presents nature as a visual spectacle and invites viewers to marvel at the crafting of non-human bodies (and ways of seeing). Nevertheless, the act of looking at nature-on-screen does not preclude the cultivation of environmental literacies in young audiences, especially when a text’s emotional range extends beyond wonder and gratification into sadness, love, anger, or frustration. As I have shown here, animation and digital representation can be particularly effective at inviting such emotional responses, especially when these modes of representation are used in ways that move beyond the limits of live-action media-making and celebrate animation’s capacity to “authenticate fantasy” (Wells 1998: 26). My intention in this chapter was particularly to determine whether representations of virtual ecosystems in children’s media might contribute to the development of environmental sensitivity, guided by Hungerford and Volk, who define environmental sensitivity as “an empathetic perspective toward the environment” (1990: 261). If we take empathy to mean the capacity to imagine other ways of seeing, feeling, and being-in-the-world, a film or game that evokes environmental empathy may allow the distance

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between viewer and text to be somewhat overcome: a viewer who feels empathy for on-screen characters and places is no longer confined to a position of spectatorial detachment. Fantasy can be an important device for enabling the gap between viewer and text to be crossed. As Rosemary Jackson reminds us: Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-­ combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different. (1981: 8)

Drawing from Jackson, we can surmise that fantasy opens a space where audiences (including children) can participate in the production of meaning about non-human nature in a way that takes nothing for granted: fantasy, in other words, teaches us to accept the other and to question the normal, allowing for a radical reimagining that can be a productive force in environmental communication. As fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin proposes, “[w]hat fantasy often does that the realistic novel generally cannot do is include the nonhuman as essential” (2007: 87, cited in Ulstein 2015: 7). This resonates with my reading of Wolfwalkers and How to Train Your Dragon in particular, where the pleasures of the story are generated through the young human protagonists’ inclusive, reciprocal relationship with non-human animals—and through the radical resistance to (adult) anthropocentric ways of thinking. Animation’s capacity for fantasy, meanwhile, can result in reconfigurations of the human/nature relationship and unique perspectives on environmental problems. The power of animation rests in the ability to express ideas metaphorically and to challenge preconceived notions of embodiment and subjectivity (Wells 1998), and this chapter has shown that these unique aspects can be used to encourage environmental empathy, perhaps even by inviting viewers into a more-­ than-­human way of seeing. At the same time, my case studies in this chapter indicate that fantasy and play may be useful strategies for communicators seeking to reach and engage young audiences outside of entertainment media. Fantasy can, for example, assist young audiences in imagining possible futures and in combining speculative ways of seeing with the lived realities of environmental problems like climate change (Rousell et al. 2017; Harris 2020). For the child, meanwhile, both fantasy and play can lead to the building of

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connections between storyworld and real world. I am reminded here of watching my own children play at being Toothless while swimming in the river on a summer holiday; ‘being a dragon’ led them to seek out fish in the river and, eventually, to question how many species of fish might inhabit this very real ecosystem. In this sense, children’s abilities to create links between fantasy and reality, or between virtual and real experiences, should not be underestimated. As Jenkins contends, children often “draw on their imagination” in order to negotiate the “gap” between lived social realities and fabricated media worlds, and their relationship to media texts, often enacted through play, can be “imaginative and transforming” (1997: 33). Collaboration with popular culture franchises may also be a useful strategy for communicators seeking to send pro-environmental messages to children, and when organisations like the WWF partner with franchises like Minecraft, new layers of meaning are created within and around a popular text. This chapter has reiterated my earlier point that paratexts play an important role in creating pathways between the virtual experiences with nature that media texts offer and the real experiences in nature that young audiences might undertake around the text. These paratexts range from promotional or authorial discourse that emphasises the link between the story and ‘real’ environmental problems to the signification work undertaken by modders, players, and fans who imbue the ‘official’ text with alternative meanings. Paratexts might trigger a more investigative reading of these texts—for example, Cressida Cowell’s short note about biodiversity in the real world invites her young reader to be contemplative, at least for a moment, about notions of non-human presence and absence, and human responsibilities in the face of environmental problems like biodiversity decline. What these case studies also show us is the extent to which children’s media texts participate in the production of meaning about the environment and play a role in orienting children towards the more-than-human world. Critical engagement with these meanings and textual positionings requires a level of media literacy; here, we return to the possibility that media literacy and environmental literacy intersect in key places. Media literacy enables young audiences to critically engage with, share, contest, or rewrite the meanings about nature that they encounter on screen. A media-literate child may understand something of the industry contexts in which these environmental meanings are produced, as well as being able to analyse textual representations, and produce and share rewritings,

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perhaps in the form of fan fiction (both How to Train Your Dragon and Wolfwalkers have inspired much of this) or their own remixes, mashups, or ‘Let’s Play’ videos (in the case of Minecraft). While all three of these texts might be used in educational settings to teach subjects such as biodiversity, conservation, or sustainability, then, there are important opportunities here for children to learn about the mediation of the more-than-human world—and the industry imperatives that guide it.

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CHAPTER 7

The Mainstreaming of Children’s Voices in Environmental Communication

In 2016 in Ontario, Canada, a video advertisement promoting the government’s climate change action plan depicted leading environmentalist David Suzuki speaking to a theatre full of children. In the thirty-second-­ long video, Suzuki explains climate change to the child audience, before calmly telling them that “not enough adults are listening”, and therefore the children will have to solve the climate problem themselves. The children look briefly bewildered, before a superimposed message on the screen addresses the real audience—the advertisement’s adult audience—with the words, “Let’s not leave this for our kids to figure out”. The advertisement takes a gently threatening tone: step up and do something about climate change, or your children will have to. It also takes away children’s agency after briefly bestowing it. For a moment, the suggestion seems to be that climate communicators like Suzuki should address children directly without adult authority figures as intermediaries. Watching this advertisement on YouTube in 2021, I cannot help but wonder what these fictional ‘children’ listening to Suzuki’s speech would have offered in the way of solutions to the climate problem. This advertisement, five years old at the time of writing this book, captures a moment in time before the upsurge of youth climate activism, when children were not mainstream audiences for or communicators of environmental messages, even though for decades they had been learning about recycling, conservation, and sustainability in the classroom, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hawley, Environmental Communication for Children, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_7

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consuming environmental media products sold to them by the film, television, magazine, and news industries (as shown in the previous chapters). Today, children are far more directly involved in the production, reception, and circulation of environmental messages than this advertisement would suggest. This development can be attributed less to the efforts of adult environmental thought leaders like Suzuki to engage young audiences, and more to the spectacular work of young—indeed, child—communicators whose cries for intergenerational justice have been heard on a global scale. Many of these young communicators are not much older than the dumbstruck, silent children depicted in the advertisement. Their work has ensured that young people are now mainstream rather than marginal voices in conversations about the planetary crisis. Thus far, this book has examined how children have become a market for environmental media, and how children’s media has played a role in the production of meaning about humans and their relationship with the more-than-human world. Yet it is essential that we consider children as not just consumers of environmental media but citizens of a world in crisis. Acknowledging that children’s voices are no longer excluded from conversations about the planetary crisis, this final chapter discusses the practices of children as environmental communicators. It explores the rise of youth climate activist movements—organisations that play an essential role in shaping the public response to the climate crisis, and that are dependent upon online connection and media engagement, with media-­savvy young people at the helm, often relying upon the celebrity image of a child or teenager. Greta Thunberg, in particular, is an interesting figure to examine here, because she has a carefully constructed brand identity that capitalises on her ability, as a teenager, to cross the boundary between adult and child. In what follows, I will analyse Thunberg’s mediated persona along with the work of other young communicators who have constructed a generational identity for children that incorporates climate activism. Scholars of environmental communication have identified a gap between awareness and behaviour (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; Brereton 2018). To achieve success, any environmental communicator seeking to achieve real-world change must overcome this gap: for it is relatively easy to change people’s minds, but much harder to spur the behavioural change (and, indeed, the policy change) that is needed in order to productively address today’s environmental problems. Environmental psychologist Renée Lertzman (2015) describes this in terms of a gap between behaviour and care, for often, we care about something but feel unable to act.

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Referring to her own experiences as an environmental communicator, she writes: Rather than trying to motivate and inspire people to act, which sets us up to push against a tide and which frames our work as persuasion, I take as a starting point that people already care a lot but may be caught up in complicated dilemmas or ‘tangles’ that make action hard to take. Thus, our job becomes recognizing the care and concern that exists and creating conditions to optimally support the expression of such care. (2015: 3)

Continuing, Lertzman argues that the question “is not about a ‘lack of care’ but rather… where does the care or concern go? How is it channelled and expressed? Where does it live inside of us?” (2015: 5). She is writing here about adults, but her point intensifies when we consider children, who often cannot act but are encouraged, by media, to care (as we have seen in the previous chapters). I propose that young environmental communicators can bridge this gap for child audiences: they perform and embody action; and when they themselves are not able to act, they express anger over the inaction of others, often in a productive way; they inhabit the space between care and action, filling this gap with emotion, colour, stories, music, words, and images. While there is still limited research on the climate outcomes of such activism, it can certainly be stated that the discursive and imaginative work of these young communicators has played a significant role in shaping—and shifting—meaning about the human/ nature relationship. In this chapter, I will also consider how the work of young climate activists is producing new meanings about childhood and the child/nature relationship, in ways that imprint upon and intersect with the narratives produced by the children’s media industries.

Environmental Activism (and Children) Activism has long played an important role in defining and disrupting cultural meanings relating to the environment (Anderson 2014). Castells notes that the environmental movement helped to “change the way we think about our collective relationship to nature” and to socially produce “a new culture of nature”, disrupting the “culture of productivism and consumerism” which “rest[s] on the premise of using nature as a resource” (2009: 304–305). Referring to the “symbiotic relationship between the media and environmentalism” (2010: 186), Castells argues that the

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environmental movement emerges largely from grassroots organisations but, at the same time, relies upon media events: “By creating events that call media attention, environmentalists are able to reach a much broader audience than their direct constituency”, he writes, while “the constant presence of environmental themes in the media has lent them a legitimacy higher than that of any other cause” (2010: 186). This interplay between top-down and bottom-up media practices, and between offline and online activities, continues to define environmental activism today, with social and digital media allowing citizens to participate in the production of meaning about the environment but also to mobilise around a specific environmental cause. Until relatively recently, scholarly investigations of environmental activism excluded children. However, there is a long history of children participating in social movement activism. As Winograd points out, children across history have participated in social movements fighting to end Apartheid, racial segregation, and child labour (2016: 9–10). In 2014 the organisation Community Change documented 100 years of youth-led social activism in the US alone: their list included marches to demand changes to child labour laws in 1903, civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s, and rallies to push for immigration reform in 2013. In 2018, the student-led March for Our Lives demonstration led to urgent public debates about gun control legislation in the wake of a devastating school shooting in Parkland, Florida. And on the website for its Australian Youth Advisory Group, the organisation Amnesty International recognises that young people have demonstrated their ability to “propel and instigate movements” (n.d.). Even in a participatory culture, children do not usually have access to mainstream media production, or to full civic participation (in the form of voting), and they are often marginalised by adult news outlets, but social movement activism is a way in which they can exert control over media narratives and their position within them. Importantly, and as Jenkins (2016: 7) reminds us, we should not think about the “political work” of young activists “simply as preparatory for adult roles” because it is “meaningful on its own terms as an intervention into core debates of our time”. More recently, youth participation in environmental activism has received a flurry of academic attention, which much of this attention clustered around Swedish teenager and young climate activist Greta Thunberg. This chapter, too, will concentrate (although not exclusively) on Thunberg, for she is an important part of the textual fabric of children’s

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environmental media. Thunberg was fifteen when she began her School Strike for Climate in 2018, sitting outside the Swedish parliament during school hours to protest the lack of government action on climate change. She documented her strike on Instagram, making herself visible in both virtual and physical spaces, and the growth in her visibility led to the launch of Fridays for Future, an international movement of children and teenagers who ‘strike’ from school on Fridays to participate in climate action. Below, I will analyse the ‘text’ of Greta Thunberg in more detail, but first, let us consider her position in an unfolding narrative of youth activism. Thunberg was inspired by the March for our Lives demonstrations and the work of young female activists like Emma González (Alter et  al. 2019). In turn, she inspired others—and she changed minds. Sabherwal and co-authors (2021) investigated adult responses to Thunberg in order to determine how she has shaped collective responses to climate change. Writing about the so-called Greta Thunberg Effect, these scholars argued that familiarity with Thunberg makes an individual more likely to participate in collective action to reduce global warming, and that Thunberg shapes the norms of collective action on climate change, especially amongst young adults (2021: 323), strengthening the collective efficacy beliefs of those in her “group”, which includes young people—although interestingly, these authors found that the Thunberg “effect” extends to adults. This is a significant finding, showing that Thunberg is best described not as an environmental communicator for children and youth but as an environmental communicator who is also a child. Thunberg did not single-handedly create youth climate activism. Organisations like The Sunrise Movement were already in action when Thunberg commenced her strike, while the youth-led Earth Guardians have been engaging in environmental advocacy since 1992. However, her influence—and the influence of the media spectacle she became—was considerable. She normalised the idea that children can communicate about the climate crisis, not as learners but as leaders, and she created a spoken and embodied language that other young people could replicate: as a child refusing to attend school, sitting in protest, making herself visible in (adult) public space, she gave other children an embodied action that could be repeatedly performed; her words, meanwhile, both written and spoken, were taken up by other young people who carried signs with the handwritten words “School Strike for Climate” to their often lonely protests and who, when asked by adults why they were not in school, repeated

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Thunberg’s claim that going to school to educate oneself in preparation for a future was useless if there wasn’t going to be a future. Thunberg thus brought visibility to children in the context of environmental activism, and developed celebrity status herself, particularly after being named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019. Mainstream media began to showcase the efforts of other young climate communicators: Brianna Fruean, environmental advocate for Samoa, a founding member of 350 Samoa who started engaging in environmental activism at age eleven; Anna Taylor, who founded the student-led climate justice organisation UK Student Climate Network (UKSCN) at the age of seventeen in 2018; Jamie Margolin, US climate activist who founded the organisation Zero Hour at the age of fifteen. Today, young people are heard to speak eloquently and powerfully about environmental problems in political contexts alongside adults: American environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 at the age of fifteen, speaking in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl; and in 2018 Autumn Peltier, Anishinaabe Indigenous rights advocate from the Wiikwemkoong First Nation in Canada, addressed the United Nations Global Landscapes Forum and the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit at the age of fourteen. Meanwhile, environmental organisations like Extinction Rebellion have begun to invite cross-­ generational participation (through the Extinction Rebellion Families platform) and have developed their own youth wings. The last eight years, then, have seen a mainstreaming of the child’s voice in the most urgent conversations about the planetary crisis. Most spectacularly, and as we have seen in previous chapters of this book, these young people drove a wave of climate activism in 2019 that saw millions of people—many of them school students—march through the public spaces of cities across the world, their protests timed to coincide with the United Nations Youth Climate Summit and Climate Action Summit in late September of that year. The protests were, in many ways, a massive amplification of Thunberg’s act of striking from school—millions of young bodies outside the classroom, speaking, chanting, waving handmade signs and banners. For cultural critic Henry Giroux, representations of youth “serve as signposts through which… society registers its own crisis of meaning, vision, and community” (Giroux 1996: 307). In 2019 and in the years since, the spillage of young people into adult public space (and into the adult space of conversations about the environment) has become a signifier of problems that were hitherto very difficult to signify:

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global warming; species extinction; climate injustice. Seizing upon the very idea of youth as a problem, young climate activists allowed themselves, the school strikers, emblems of civic disobedience, to embody these environmental problems and make them visible—indeed, make them impossible not to see.

Media Tools and Popular Culture Media tools played a vital role in the organisation and execution of the 2019 protests. Even more so than other activists, children and young people are using media tools in a way that diverges from traditional models of communication. As Mizuko Ito and her co-authors in the Digital Youth Project outlined back in 2009, today’s young people are growing up in a “new media ecology” and are “participants in a shared culture where new social media, online media distribution, and digital media production are commonplace among their peers and in their everyday school contexts” (Ito et al. 2009: xiii). This enables peer-to-peer communication outside the confines of adult institutions and authorities. Young climate activists have drawn particularly on the affordances of social media, which include visibility (the ability to create an audience who can “bear witness”) and spreadability (the ability to share content with ease) (boyd 2014: 11). Thunberg herself used Instagram to document the embodied act of her initial strike and is now active on Twitter. Her fellow activists use Instagram and Facebook—often creating several accounts to tailor their communication to small groups, relying on a network of persuasive communication rather than a singular message broadcast to the world; they also use platforms like Discord and visual tools like memes (Varghese 2019; Lipstein 2019). These strategies for digital networking and message dispersal were foregrounded during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which media coverage of climate change fell and activists were unable to physically protest due to public health restrictions. During the pandemic, Fridays for Future shifted to weekly ‘digital strikes’ using digital tools such as a ‘strikers’ map’, practices such as live streaming, and platforms like Twitter (Haßler et al. 2021; Sorce and Dumitrica 2021). Images were shared of young protestors holding handmade signs or placards placed in front of parliamentary buildings, giving the digital strikes a sense of authentic connection to the physical protests of pre-COVID times. The video-sharing platform TikTok, too, has become an important space for young environmental communicators in the years since the 2019

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protests. Hautea and co-authors argue that the platform’s affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics and “networked streams of storytelling” through which environmental messages travel (2021: 5). Biodiversity TikToks, for example, are a powerful form of environmental communication often produced by young people (Craggs Mersinoglu 2020) that are creating new avenues for public engagement on environmental topics. Referring to the work of a twenty-­ four-­year-old who created a TikTok video of the Earth on fire accompanied by the superimposed words “Hey, stop scrolling, our planet is fucking dying”, journalist Emma Pattee points out that there is a level of trust amongst communities on platforms like TikTok: Rather than a scientist or academic explaining climate change in a way that’s overly complicated and laced with jargon and hedging, watching these stories on TikTok is like having a friend tell you what’s happening and why you ought to be concerned. (2021)

Australian journalist Ariel Bogle, meanwhile, writes about the platform’s irreverent humour as a communication tool: “TikTok’s sardonic humour is a product of a generation facing a dark future”, she states, showcasing the work of a twenty-one-year-old woman from the Victorian highlands in Australia who makes TikToks about a range of environmental issues, from planting trees to fires in the Amazon (2021). Many of these young content creators are, of course, not children—however, in their early twenties, they have a proximity to childhood and create content that children view and share, much like the YouTubers discussed in the previous chapter. Strategies such as remix, meanwhile, allow communicators of a range of ages to play with and subvert the intended meanings of industry-­ based environmental narratives. In her TikToks, for example, the aforementioned young woman living in the Victorian highlands sources images from mainstream media outlets like National Geographic which she combines with dramatic messages about environmental harm or personal efficacy. She combines this remix practice with her frank, sometimes angry, always down-to-earth mode of delivery. One video, for example, begins with an image of the woman herself looking depressed, overlain with images of ‘bad’ environmental news stories from 2021. She then proceeds to tell her audience about some of the ‘good’ environmental news of the year. Here, she acknowledges her place in the news flow: she is both the overwhelmed viewer and the gatekeeper, directing her audiences to

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positive news, in this instance, because she believes it will encourage them to “give a shit”. It is important to note that these young communicators are not defined by the digital tools they use, or confined to the virtual spaces in which they gather and appear, although digital activities are vital to their communication practices. Jenkins uses the term “by any media necessary” to explain how young activists in a digitally networked world take advantage of any available media channel to tell their stories and communicate with diverse publics (2016: 16). While they are strategic about their media choices, young activists are also opportunistic, taking advantage of whatever media tools, channels, and popular culture fragments they have at their disposal, because more so than adults, they lack easy access to mainstream media production. For this reason, when Jenkins and his co-authors explore the tactics of young activists in their book By Any Media Necessary they shift the focus from singular platforms (Twitter, Facebook) to “transmedia mobilisation” (2016: 17) and to the relationship between online and offline practices. Importantly, too, unlike the culture jammers of the broadcast era who sought to disrupt ‘the signal’, the young media activists in the age of participatory culture and spreadable media borrow from and use the resources of popular culture: “Rather than seeing themselves as saboteurs who seek to destroy the power of popular culture, they regard popular narratives as shared resources that facilitate their conversations”, Jenkins writes (2016: 18). The use of music is a particularly interesting way in which young environmental communicators and climate activists have joined or been swept up into the narratives of popular culture. For example, the 2021 rock song “The Children Will Rise Up” was created by an eleven-year-old child who sings about the impact of climate change on her generation to a backdrop of dramatic climate-related imagery. Shared on Instagram, the song was seen and heard by hundreds of thousands of viewers and earned praise from former US President Barack Obama, who shared the video on his Facebook page—a powerful example of the proximity between young grassroots communicators and adult celebrities, thought leaders, and political figures, who mix in shared virtual spaces and communicate using the same digital tools. This music video showcases the power of children to create spreadable media content, which also becomes a site of the reconstruction of childhood—the girl’s angry rock vocals and the climate change imagery that accompanies them explosively disrupt any vestiges of the myth of the innocent, silent child-in-nature. Music has also played a

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role in the propulsion of Greta Thunberg’s celebrity identity, with prominent musicians engaging publicly with her brand narrative. Bebe Rexha’s song about female empowerment, “You Can’t Stop the Girl”, for example, was dedicated by the artist to Thunberg in a Twitter post (2019). Thunberg’s speech to the 2019 UN Climate Summit also entered the slipstream of popular culture. “We will not let you get away with this”, she spoke fiercely to the adult audience. “Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not”. Soon afterwards, a YouTuber created and shared a video that remixed Thunberg’s words with British musician Fatboy Slim’s 1999 song “Right Here, Right Now”. Fatboy Slim himself subsequently shared the remix on his Facebook page and later performed it live. The famous DJ’s performance of the remix was, in turn, reported on by news media outlets including The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The New  York Post, and Time magazine. Thunberg’s speech and the remix are both media objects, circulating at speed in a media environment that privileges shareable, impactful content. The live performance of the remix by Fatboy Slim, meanwhile, functioned as a meeting of voices—artist, (child) activist, and citizen—and a coalescence of emotion; it was a moment of intense passion that gained further shareability and longevity by positioning itself at the centre of grassroots engagement.

Stolen Childhood and a Planet on Fire: The Messages and Tactics of Young Environmental Communicators Earlier in this book, I explored how media can be seen to damage children’s relationships with the natural world. The myth of the “nature deficit disorder” (Louv 2010; see Chap. 2), in particular, implicates electronic media and can be defined as an iteration of the media effects model, in which media is seen to pull children away from a peaceful, wholesome, and harmonious relationship with nature. Another version of the media effects model sees media as a liberating force, and this offers a template that informs public responses to the rise of youth climate activism: digital devices and social networks have freed young people and empowered them to speak out about serious topics like climate change. However, this media effects myth, too, must be dismantled in order to productively analyse the discursive practices of young environmental activists, because here

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the medium obscures the message: too much focus on media tools and digital creativity takes attention away from the semiotic work these young people are achieving. Importantly, too, it is the lived experience of climate change rather than the lure of digital communication practices that has motivated many of these young communicators: Thunberg, famously, was depressed about global warming and lived the experience of eco-anxiety long before she took up her activist cloak (or hoodie); Jamie Margolin writes and speaks about the wildfires that spurred her activist practices (see Margolin 2020); and Brianna Fruean speaks often of the floods and storms that Pacific Island Peoples experience due to climate change—she has spoken about the palpable, earthed experience of digging mud out of her home after floodwaters recede (quoted in Shapiro et al. 2021). To refer to young climate activists as virtual and digital communicators alone is to deprive them of their embodied agency and their position at the frontline of the climate emergency. Kitzinger writes about the way social movements work to “reframe” issues and “negotiate shared understandings” of problems (2007: 136). Often, she tells us, it can take strong messaging, including powerful imagery, to “dislodge taken-for-granted frames and replace them with the campaigners’ preferred perspective on reality” (2007: 136). This is the work that young climate activists have undertaken—a struggle over the meaning of climate change itself, and a dislodgement of frames relating not just to the environment but to justice, risk, harm, criminality, citizenship, and childhood itself. Again, Thunberg has played a driving role in reframing environmental problems as emergencies. “I want you to act as if the house was on fire”, she stated at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2019b, collapsing the future into the present by suggesting that the future demands similar immediate attention to a present-time house-fire. Indeed, much of the expressive work undertaken by Thunberg and other young activists lies in the construction of a sense of present-time emergency. Those without access to the rhetorical privileges granted to Thunberg, who is able to address adult audiences in formal political settings, use visual and verbal (and embodied) signification practices during climate marches where home-made signs often attract the attention of photojournalists. For example, one sign created by Australian protestors in 2020 (viewed on the online Climate Sign Archive) is made to resemble a road sign and contains the words “Danger: climate catastrophe ahead” with the word “ahead” scribbled out and replaced with the handwritten word “here”. This simple sign communicates a sense of urgency and crisis

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through the word ‘danger’, collapses the future into the present with the swapping of “ahead” and “here”, and also signifies the child’s own grassroots, embodied participation through the handmade, handwritten aspects of the sign (Climate Sign Archive, Anonymous, 22 February 2020). Often, these signs are adult-facing and use, indeed weaponise, the child’s own position and unique vantage point: one proclaims, “When I was young, inland Australia was habitable—me at 70” (Anonymous, 22 February 2010); another handwritten sign simply states “A Generation with Nothing to Lose” on a piece of cardboard (Anonymous, 10 January 2020). Thunberg’s house-fire metaphor is also an often-repeated communication tool that features heavily on children’s handmade signs. The evocation of an apocalyptic narrative is an important communication tool here (Feldman 2020: 2), bringing about a revelation—both a revealing of the crisis and its immediacy, and a Biblical collapse of temporal structures. Significantly, this depiction of the planet on fire (a house-fire of global proportions; a burning of our planetary home) is unlike most depictions of the natural world in children’s media—it is an image borrowed from adult media culture and the science fiction genre. But in the midst of this apocalyptic narrative, the young activists have made themselves present along with the crisis. As Fruean demonstrates through her references to floodwater and the mud on her own hands, personal storytelling is a powerful tool for these young communicators, who, like the March for Our Lives student activists before them, are keen to tell their own stories rather than be absorbed by the narratives of mainstream (adult) media (Bent 2019: 58). Their communicative practices have also evoked a struggle over the meaning of youth and childhood. Giroux writes: Youth as a complex, shifting, and contradictory category is rarely narrated in the dominant public sphere through the diverse voices of the young. Prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents, youth become an empty category inhabited by the desires, fantasies, and interests of the adult world. (1996: 307)

As youth activism becomes more normalised, Giroux’s point becomes less true. Young activists tell the story of youth loudly and clearly in the public sphere, expressing their own “desires, fantasies, and interests” and showing how these conflict with the desires of adults. Through these media tools and embodied actions, young people are (re)writing the story

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of the child’s place in environmental activism, while also calling for a change in the way (adult) humans relate to the natural world—but arguably, their central achievement is the eruption of young voices into public conversations about the environment, leading to an overwriting of the long-held image of the silent child-in-nature. The very image of the young climate activist upsets the assumption that the child belongs in nature, that placing the child (back) in nature will solve environmental problems, and that children’s green time is untouched by politics and ideologically free. Access to a clean and abundant green world is, instead, framed by these activists as a rights issue and a problem, rather than an easy solution: if the natural world is depleted and degraded by adults, they argue, there will be no future for children, let alone any ‘green time’ to worry about. Just as the image of youth climate activism places the child in urban and/or digital rather than natural spaces, it also poses a challenge to the idea that the child-in-nature is a reality that doesn’t have to be struggled for. Youth climate activism has also disrupted the myth of childhood innocence, although as we will see below, certain social actors (most notably Greta Thunberg) also strategically use this myth of childhood innocence as a communicative tool. It is primarily through youth climate activism that new voices are speaking through media to children about environmental issues. After decades of being addressed by the media industries as green consumers—of being sold environmentalism, in King’s words (1994: 108)—children are now being hailed in a peer-to-peer manner: young people are speaking to young people about the environment, and young people (in some cases, children—i.e., people under the age of eighteen) are playing a role in directing the flow of media content in ways that powerfully shape meaning about the environment. They are also shaping children as audiences for environmental media. As Jarvis points out in her profile of Jamie Margolin for the New York Times (2020), teenage activists inhabit the dual worlds of childhood and adulthood, and can therefore act as important intermediaries helping young children understand the political, social, and ecological realities of environmental change. Margolin regularly communicates to children about climate action—like other young activists, herself in some senses still a ‘child’, she has become an environmental communicator who participates in defining childhood by addressing children about the harsh realities of climate change and the possibilities of climate action. Her book, Youth to Power, provides young readers with a toolkit for

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participating in climate activism, and this text also becomes a site for the redefinition of childhood. Of young people, Margolin writes: We are yet to be broken and burned out. We are still closer than adults to that part of ourselves that is full of questions, challenges, and a refusal to accept the state of the world around us. We have fresh energy, insight, and a unique power to create change in our world. What we get in trouble most for at school is usually questioning the rules. But questioning the rules may actually be where our greatest power lies. (2020)

Here, Margolin is crafting her brand identity. She is a rebel; she is empowered; her strongest traits—willingness to question, fresh energy, and insight—are linked to childhood (they are traits that distinguish children from adults), but they are not linked to school or the domestic space; they are traits that arise from the wellspring of childhood itself. Importantly, her depiction of childhood is not limited to innocence or to curiosity: she is indeed “full of questions” but she is also a rule-breaker who does not stop at questioning and who moves past curiosity into “a refusal to accept the state of the world”. It is interesting that legacy media—in this case, the book publishing industry—has played an important role in crafting Margolin’s brand narrative, alongside various social and digital media platforms. Documentary film, similarly, has played a role in the construction of youth climate activism as a collective identity: the documentary films Wild Things (2020) and Youth Unstoppable (2018) both take audiences ‘inside’ the youth climate movement, with the latter being itself directed by a young activist. Other young activists have, like Margolin, written books—Australian teenager Jean Hinchliffe, for example, addresses her reader “from the frontline of youth climate activism” in her book Lead the Way. Her text, like Margolin’s, is a call to action and a toolkit for activists, but it is also a brand-building exercise in which Hinchliffe presents herself as an ordinary girl who transcends the limits imposed on childhood by adults. “I was essentially a random kid”, she writes, describing her first television interview. This sense of childlike ordinariness allows her, like Margolin and Thunberg, to be a child and also an activist: these young communicators do not have to escape childhood in order to construct an activist persona. Indeed, Hinchliffe constructs an image of vulnerability, depicting herself as the child overwhelmed by the world:

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When you look at the magnitude of the issues we face today, it’s hard to find the motivation to go out and try to change things: it can seem as though the problems out there are so deeply ingrained that it’s simply impossible to make a difference… But letting yourself hide under the covers is doing nobody any favours. The world can be a strange and scary place, and it’s everyone’s duty to brighten it up, even just a little. Though you might feel insignificant, the biggest changes always come from the accumulation of tiny actions. (2021)

Here, Hinchliffe seems to be addressing readers across age barriers— her tone is inclusive, but this is not an adult-specific mode of address; and she hails children, in particular, with her references to hiding under the covers from a “strange and scary” world. Her simple metaphor serves to dismantle adult/child boundaries: the implication is that everyone (adults and children) feels scared and powerless at times, but no one should let that feeling guide their response to the world. Margolin, in contrast, addresses children and young people more directly and exclusively in her book, including them in the activist identity she constructs: Whoever told you that you don’t belong in the political world or that you do not have what it takes to fight for a cause is full of it. You (Yes, YOU!) belong with us, the young people changing the world. You are one of us. Welcome. (2020)

In a similar manner, the “unofficial biography” of Greta Thunberg, Greta’s Story (one of many books published about the Swedish teen) is written for children and constructs youth activism as an identity that is both accessible and desirable. Thunberg is depicted as intelligent, brave, and persistent: a young girl with courage and determination, whose iconic Skolstrejk för klimatet handmade sign is a signifier of her ordinariness and a reminder that she did not have access to any special tools or competencies when building her activist self (Camerini 2019). Giroux writes that representations of youth in popular media provide young people with “specific lessons in how to view themselves, others, and the world they inhabit” (1996: 325). In a similar way, children—who often look to representations of teenagers and pre-teens for their own identity-building tools—are invited to see themselves in Thunberg, Margolin, and Hinchliffe, who perform childhood and also normalise the figure of the environmentally active child, offering the invitation to inhabit this persona as a source of pleasure and meaning.

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The Framing of Youth Climate Activism by Adults and Mainstream Media The response to youth climate activism by adult commentators and mainstream media has been varied in the years since Thunberg first drew the public eye. Many prominent adult communicators have not only endorsed the efforts of the young activists but deliberately made space for them to speak. For example, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and thought leader on climate justice, allowed young climate activists to co-­ opt an episode of her podcast Mothers of Invention. Described as a “youth takeover”, the episode “We may be small but our impact is huge” saw Robinson and her co-host Maeve Higgins remove themselves from the conversation, allowing Indigenous Mexican-Chilean climate activist Xiye Bastida and young comedian Pooja Reddy to command the sonic stage— both a gesture of respect and an acknowledgement that young people are best placed to articulate their own aspirations and intentions. In a parallel example of (sonic) solidarity, Australian musician Megan Washington performed the song “Crystal Clear” at the City Recital Hall in Sydney, a piece that sets to music (composed by Robert Davidson) Thunberg’s speech to the 2019 UN Climate Summit; the song is named after Thunberg’s words, “For more than thirty years, the science has been crystal clear”. Here, an adult celebrity amplifies Thunberg’s message, literally singing along with her words but never allowing the music (or the adult voice) to drown her out. “Greta’s speech is the definition of punk”, Washington is quoted in The Guardian as saying, “and more important than any song that has been written in my lifetime” (2019). Expressions of respect from adult authority figures have allowed young and old voices to intermingle and for an intergenerational narrative of shared commitment to emerge in the mainstream media. British politician and COP26 President Alok Sharma, for example, gave a sober and respectful summation of the presence of young people in debates about climate action: Wherever I have been in the world, I have been struck by the passion and the commitment of young people to climate action. The voices of young people must be heard and reflected in these negotiations here at COP. The actions and scrutiny of young people are key to us keeping 1.5 alive and creating a net-zero future. (quoted in UN News 2021)

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Sharma’s use of the term “scrutiny” is particularly interesting here, and adds another layer to the power of young people in environmental conversations: for young people are also witnesses whose gaze upon adults holds the current generation to account for their (in)actions. Arguably, though, Sharma is here evoking an adult way of seeing, in which childhood is not a lived subjectivity in itself but a tool for defining and imagining adulthood. Thunberg has, of course, also drawn copious criticism from adult commentators. Right-wing spokespeople have attacked her demeanour (she is not cheerful enough), accused her of mental instability (she is open about having Asperger’s syndrome), and undermined her agency by suggesting that she is manipulated or controlled by her parents or other adults (Wright 2019; Roberts 2019). For some right-wing commentators, Thunberg represents corrupted childhood and/or subverted relationships where a child can control or bully adults (Meyer 2019). Her consistent return to the science has allowed her to sidestep most of these claims, as has her authentic brand identity—there are little, if any, contradictions in the way she presents herself, and her persona is constructed with almost dogged consistency, allowing her to exist as a counterpoint to the duplicity of adult authority figures in the Trump era—thus, in a profile for the New Yorker, Gessen (2019) describes Thunberg as the “anti-Trump”: She is young and he is old. She is honest and he is a habitual liar. She relies on science and he relies on nothing but his gut. Her focus is on the forecastable future, and he lives in an imaginary past. (Gessen 2019)

Similarly, in an article for Vox entitled “Why the right’s usual smears don’t work on Greta Thunberg”, Roberts (2019), cataloguing the various ways Thunberg resists attacks on her character, presents her as an almost shining, invulnerable figure—an antidote to the troll culture of the twenty-­ first century. Trump himself, meanwhile, has used sarcasm and condescension as weapons against Thunberg, reframing her messages as hysterical and demanding that she return to acceptable childhood behaviour. “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem”, he wrote on Twitter, “then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” (quoted in Jarvis 2020). In the wake of her scathing speech at the 2019 UN Climate Summit, Trump tweeted sardonically, “[s]he seems like a

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very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!”. Thunberg’s response was to edit her Twitter bio to read, “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future”. This simple communicative tactic evoked a sense of ‘beating the adults at their own game’: in the face of adult attacks on her character, Thunberg performs herself as a teenager, rankling the adults by absorbing criticism into her identity rather than obediently snapping back to the behaviour of a good child. Her use of sarcasm here is a two-pronged tool, showing that she can communicate with adults using their own discursive modes, while also capitalising on the childlike propensity for ‘play’ (surely, no adult politician can ‘out-play’ a child). This ability to step with ease inside and outside the boundaries of childhood is important and will be addressed in more detail momentarily. Much scholarly research has focused on the way mainstream media representations of youth climate activists have undermined their political legitimacy. Feldman (2020: 2) points out that more so than other (adult) climate activists, the School Strikers have been challenged for lacking the authority, as children, to speak about scientific and political matters. In Australia, news coverage repeated the expressions of concern by politicians and other adult public commentators that the Strikers were out of school (Feldman 2020: 5), reinforcing the notion that children are embedded in educational rather than political contexts. Feldman writes: By focusing on protestors’ age and lack of perspective or education, critics of the School Strikers are able to attack them for their ability to speak on the issue via a commonly accepted deficit attitude toward young people’s engagement with polity. Of the rhetorical approaches available to critique the School Strikers, the ethos of youth can be swiftly and efficiently discredited through focus on their exclusion from adult systems of governance. (2020: 5)

Similarly, in their analysis of Canadian editorials written in response to youth climate activism, Raby and Sheppard found that discourses of childhood innocence and becoming are used to position children as unknowing, apolitical and unable to represent themselves, while at the same time excluding the knowing, engaged and political child from the category of childhood and its potential protections. (2021: 382)

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In this way, the status of youth can be “evoked by critics to undermine activists”, as Barnes puts it (2021: 10)—it can also be evoked as a frame in media coverage, even when the intention is not to openly criticise. In a manner that paralleled the extreme claims of right-wing commentators, mainstream news responses to youth climate activism sometimes reinforced a myth of childhood innocence by suggesting that adults were controlling the child activists (Feldman 2020) or harming them by exposing them to eco-anxiety (Raby and Sheppard 2021: 385). Bergmann and Ossewaarde describe this as an “ageist domination of climate activist youth through media systems” (2020: 268). Indeed, in media coverage of youth climate activism, the age of the activists is often seized upon as the most newsworthy aspect of the protests, and this obsessive focus on the youthfulness of the activists diverts debate away from climate change (Bergmann and Ossewaarde 2020: 272). As Thew and co-authors have pointed out, moreover, the labelling of youth as “tomorrow’s people” in media narratives about activism can frame them as “irrelevant in the present” (2020: 4)—it can also dismiss or diminish the experiences of young people in the Global South who are experiencing the realities of climate change now, rather than in the future. While much media coverage of youth climate activism has been positive, even the positive coverage has tended to reproduce the trope of the “activist girl hero” (Raby and Sheppard 2021: 383), largely through a focus on Thunberg herself as an individual. Girl hero framing is not unique to climate activism and has been seen in coverage of other teenage girl activists like Malala Yousafzai (education for girls) and Emma González (gun control laws) (Bent 2019). In the case of climate activism, as Bergmann and Ossewaarde observe, “paternalist media systems stamp their image of young girl heroism on Greta Thunberg” and this “sheds doubt on youth activism” (2020: 283)—narratives of individual heroism allow Thunberg to be seen as an exceptional product of the Western education system, while at the same time undermining the activists’ message and diluting their political legitimacy by enforcing the idea that most young people (with a few notable exceptions) are not interested in politics (Raby and Sheppard 2021: 390). Thunberg’s depiction in Time magazine upon being named Person of the Year in 2019 contributed greatly to this heroic imaging: the print cover of the magazine shows her in a pink hoodie, standing on a rock while waves crash at her feet, with a slightly low camera angle to signify empowerment, while the opening paragraph of the accompanying article activates a quest narrative:

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Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat, ice coats the decks, and the sea batters the vessel that will take this slight girl, her father and a few companions from Virginia to Portugal. For a moment, it’s as if Thunberg were the eye of a hurricane, a pool of resolve at the center of swirling chaos. (Alter et al. 2019)

It is little wonder, then, that news media coverage of the climate strikes tended to reduce the climate activist cause to a more easily reproducible and commodifiable story about a girl rising above hardship to save the world—a story with popular culture intersections that will be explored in more detail below. Thunberg, a young white woman, receives far more media attention than young activists of colour, and herein lies another problem with the girl hero frame. Climate activism by BIPOC girls is neglected or even erased by the mainstream media (Raby and Sheppard 2021: 391): infamously, young Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped from a photograph, which also featured Thunberg, by the Associated Press (Kenya 2020). At the intersection between media, youth, and climate activism, then, there is also silence, absence, injustice, and racism: even while they are depicted in celebratory images of street protests that signify the ease and joy of the activist experience, these young people must still grapple with the (invisible) power structures of the societies in which they are embedded, along with the gatekeepers that comprise mainstream media. In an analysis of Nakate, who founded the Youth for Future Africa and Rise Up movements, Barnes (2021) highlights the barriers she faces which relate to indigeneity and gender, as well as the abuse she received from journalists and social media commentators alike. Barnes points out that although Nakate is an older youth activist, she is infantilised in public commentary: “For some conservative commentators, her reprehensible behaviour is typical of a precocious girl child”, Barnes writes, referring to her public displays of emotion (including a tearful video response to the photo-cropping incident) and a handwritten letter she penned to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, actions which are framed in public commentary as “veering out of her lane” (2021: 10). Interestingly, Nakate, in her twenties, and Thunberg, a teenager, are both seen by adults as being on the wrong side of the child/adult boundary—Nakate is condemned for acting like a precocious child, while Thunberg receives sarcastic

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commentary from no less than the President of the United States for her refusal to adopt normal childlike behaviour. Barnes, though, is quick to point out that youth activists are not simply the passive recipients of oppressive systems and structures, and by deploying their agency they can “resist, negotiate, manoeuvre, break down and reconstitute their positions” (Barnes 2021: 2). What is clear is that despite their framing in the mainstream media or the efforts of certain commentators to undermine their agency, the actions of young environmental activists are altering the news narrative about climate change. In particular, they have changed the narrative so that climate change and environmental degradation are seen in terms of justice (especially intergenerational justice). As noted above, they have also intervened in the construction of childhood and the child/ nature relationship, and they have challenged the notion that returning children to nature will solve the planet’s problems, constructing an alternative image of children as rights-holders in relation to the environment. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall tells us that mainstream media, through selection of sources, and particularly by turning to expert and authoritative voices, can allow certain actors to control how an issue is discussed in the public sphere. Referring to news media specifically, Hall and his co-­ authors identify two aspects of the news production process that inform the inclusion of such voices: “the practical pressures of constantly working against the clock and the professional demands of impartiality and objectivity” (2013: 61). These two factors “combine to produce a systematically structured over-accessing to the media of those in powerful and privileged institutional positions” (2013: 61). In this way, news reproduces the views of the powerful. These spokespeople become ‘primary definers’ of a topic and set the limit for all subsequent definitions and discussions of this topic. For decades, the primary definers of the environmental crisis have been (adult) scientists and politicians. Thunberg and her fellow activists, in turn, are ‘counter-definers’: people who lack the privilege and authority of a primary definer but who challenge established views and values in society, while also having to work with the language and interpretations that are already in place. Given the persistent presence of Thunberg in discussions about the climate crisis and her impact on conversations in the public sphere, we might describe her as a counter-­ definer who has become a primary definer (Hawley et al. 2018). This shift from counter to primary definer does not define all climate activists, though, suggesting that the problematic “girl hero” frame is also, for

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better or worse, an essential component of propelling these young figures into the public sphere.

Traversing the Adult/Child Boundary The circulation of Greta Thunberg’s celebrity image has been crucial to her success as a climate communicator. Far more so than other youth climate activists, Thunberg “has a hold on our collective imagination” (Gessen 2019), and the details of both her physical appearance (hoodie, comfortable shoes, braids, no makeup) and her way of speaking (defiant, to-the-point, serious, fact-centric) are remarkably consistent, demonstrating that she is cognisant not only of her own strengths as a communicator but also of the need to curate and maintain her brand identity. Arguably, then, it is not just the girl hero media frame that grants her visibility and prominence, but her own prowess at managing her persona. That she keeps such a close alignment between her persona and her motives as a climate activist allows her to achieve authenticity as a celebrity and efficacy as a communicator. She also offers access to something elusive: a childlike perspective on the world. It is likely for this reason that she has become not only a source of inspiration to children but an object of desire and fascination for adults. Although Thunberg has been a teenager throughout her activist career to date, it is notable that signifiers of childhood (rather than teenager-­ hood) are often evoked in media representations that frame her for the adult gaze. In the Time “Person of the Year” profile, for example, childhood objects (“a child’s yellow raincoat”) and mannerisms (“tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt”) are repeatedly mentioned, and it is bluntly stated that “Thunberg is 16 but looks 12” (Alter et al. 2019). This is not to say that the authors of this piece do not refer to her remarkable achievements as a spokesperson in political arenas: there is extensive cataloguing of her speeches and accomplishments, and in the text, these co-­ exist with mentions of her status as a child. In his profile for New York magazine, meanwhile, climate writer David Wallace-Wells prefaces his again extensive discussion of her achievements and impact with a reminder of her beginnings as an “unknown, awkward, nearly friendless 15-year-old making a lonely protest outside the Swedish Parliament against her country’s absolute indifference to the climate crisis”; referring to another child hero, he describes her as the “Joan of Arc of climate change” (2019). Notably, these two profile pieces are deeply respectful of Thunberg and

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treat her as a formidable and influential environmental communicator— but while they do not necessarily fetishise her status as a child, they repeatedly draw the (adult) reader’s gaze back to it. It is useful here to consider how representations of childhood in media and popular culture allow the boundary between adulthood and childhood to be policed. Patricia Holland writes that the construction of childhood displays the social and psychic effort that goes into negotiating the difficult distinction between adult and child, to keep childhood separate from an adulthood that can never be fully achieved. Attempts are made to establish dual and opposing categories and hold them firm in a dichotomy set against the actual continuity of growth and development. There is an active struggle to maintain childhood—if not actual children—as pure and uncontaminated. (1992: 12–13)

Drawing on Holland, David Buckingham observes that representations of childhood are part of a continuous effort on the part of adults to gain control over childhood and its implications—not only over actual children, but also over our own childhoods, which we are constantly mourning and constantly reinventing. (2000: 10)

Seen from this perspective, media depictions of Thunberg present an opportunity for adult media-makers to create a protective circle around childhood and to grant adult audiences something of a backstage pass to this usually inaccessible space. Not just an account of being an activist, texts like the Time article offer rich descriptions of being a child—and they depict childhood as the pure, unchanging centre in a world of chaos and despair. In reproducing Thunberg’s childhood as an object of fascination for adult readers, these texts also clearly mark the boundary between adulthood and childhood. While media representations of Thunberg confirm the adult/child boundary, Thunberg herself has an uncomfortable quality relating to her ability to cross that boundary. Referring to her “Pippilongstocking braid” and “searing stare”, Meyer (2019) writes that Thunberg is a “flummoxing figure” because she “looks younger than her years, yet her speeches take a shaming, authoritative tone that is, at the very least, unusual for a child”.

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Thunberg is “flummoxing”, or unsettling, uneasy, because she moves across adult/child boundaries. This movement is linked to the liminality of her status as a teenager, which is also, Meyer claims, the secret behind her persuasive power and appeal: Thunberg epitomizes, in a person, the unique moral position of being a teenager. She can see the world through an ‘adult’ moral lens, and so she knows that the world is a heartbreakingly flawed place. But unlike an actual adult, she bears almost no conscious blame for this dismal state. (2019)

Scholarly discussions of youth as a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood often refer to youth as a non-identity, a tricky position in which one is perpetually seen as a deficient adult or a problematic child: Hopkins, for example, writes that young people are constructed in relation to both children and adults, meaning that young people are often stereotyped as not being as independent, mature or as sensible as adults, whilst not also being as cute, innocent and as vulnerable as younger children. (2010: 9)

What we see in Thunberg’s case, though, is that youth is also a freeing state in which one can slip between childhood and adulthood at will. Often, it is Thunberg’s ability to step back into the childhood space—the space where adults cannot always follow her—that provides her with discursive power. In order to succeed as environmental communicators, child activists like Thunberg have certainly adopted adult-like behaviours, showing competency, practicality, a propensity for hard work, and a no-nonsense approach. ‘Going on strike’ itself is an adult action, one that relates to work and the withholding of one’s benefit to society. In itself, this adoption of adult behaviour towards the environment is nothing new. Writing of environmental messaging in the 1990s, Gauntlett argues: Children are expected to act in a sensible—what we would otherwise call ‘adult’ or ‘grown-up’—manner towards the environment, whilst being told that it is the adults and grown-ups who have brought about very serious ecological problems. (2004)

What is unusual is the way in which Thunberg, in particular, also harnesses particularities of childhood in her communication: honesty,

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ferocity, anger, emotion, and a tendency to speak to adults in a demanding way. Speaking to world leaders at the 2019 Climate Action Summit, Thunberg proclaimed: This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! (Thunberg 2019a)

With emotion evident in her spoken words, Thunberg here disrupts the understanding that communication in the (adult) public sphere should be primarily rational—instead, she uses the power of the child to communicate on an emotional level. This emotional communication works in two, seemingly contradictory, ways: on the one hand, it is more acceptable for a child to speak in an emotional way and to show emotions in public, so Thunberg is harnessing her power and her rights as a child, and this allows her to ‘get away with’ behaviour that would arguably be criticised in an adult (woman). On the other hand, the emotions that Greta expresses— fury and outrage, and a sense of betrayal—are aggressively directed towards adults; she does not invite adults to ‘share’ her emotions, but she wants them to be heard. This disrupts the mythic image of childhood as innocent and apolitical and of children as peaceful, warm, loving, and trusting of adults. At the same time, Thunberg is quick to reference her own childhood when speaking to adult world leaders. “You are never too small to make a difference”, she stated during her speech in Poland at COP24 in 2018— words that call attention to her own status as a child (and are also likely to resonate with children) while also recalling popular culture narratives in which unassuming, unlikely, often literally “small” heroes change the course of history (a similar sentiment is expressed, for instance, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy). Repeatedly, Thunberg tells adult policy-makers that they have stolen her childhood or that they have stolen the future of their own children, thus joining the semiotic warfare over the use of childhood as a signifier for ‘the future’. In an interesting twist during her 2019 Climate Summit speech, she strategically deploys the myth of childhood immaturity: “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that

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burden you leave to us children”. As Roberts points out, her childhood status is also used to shield her from entanglement with political viewpoints and ideologies: Adults have political worldviews and very few have the discipline to keep them entirely hidden. But Thunberg is, in her own words, an ‘uneducated teenager.’ She’s 16 years old! She can’t be expected to know what actions government agencies need to take and she doesn’t pretend to. (2019)

Her discursive work, therefore, mobilises but also deconstructs the adult conceptualisation of childhood. It is perhaps not surprising that we see her message about childhood carried across many iterations of youth climate activism. For example, we see the very boundary-play that Thunberg displays in her speeches enacted in “Teach the Teacher”, an initiative organised by MockCOP26—a constellation of youth delegates organised in 2020 out of frustration with the postponement of COP26 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Teach the Teacher involves a role reversal: students would visit schools in countries including the UK, Bangladesh, India, and Ecuador and speak with educators about climate change, climate justice, and climate literacy. Such campaigns disrupt the power relation between adult and child social actors, and they also disrupt the knowledge deficit model itself, highlighting the ability of children to lead as well as passively benefit from the development of eco-literacies in society. In this sense, the boundary between child and adult—and the ability of some social actors to repeatedly cross that boundary—has become an important aspect of environmental communication in the twenty-first century.

Rewriting Childhood This chapter has examined the child’s voice and presence in grassroots movements calling for climate action. It has raised, and attempted to answer, questions about the effectiveness of children as environmental communicators: for children, as social actors who are perceived as both relatable and honest, have the potential to normalise pro-environmental behaviour as well as environmental activism. In their investigation of intergenerational learning, Lawson and co-authors found that children are “a more trusted and ideologically neutral pathway for climate change information than other commonly relied upon sources” (2018: 205). Their

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discussion of the child’s influence over parents is a reminder that the child’s power as environmental communicator is certainly evident in peer-­ to-­ peer communication—children speaking to other children—but it should not be thought of as exclusively so, because children can persuasively speak about climate change to adult audiences. Greta Thunberg, in her various speeches to world leaders, embodies the power of the child to speak passionately and eloquently about the issues that impact them— superficially, she shows how this power can be used outside the domestic or school context (indeed, on the world stage) but, more deeply, she also offers young people a language, a toolkit, with which to speak about the environment to the adults in their lives. Throughout this chapter, I have shown that youth climate activism has led to a redefinition of childhood, largely because young people are active in the defining process. The myth of childhood innocence, while at times called upon in a knowing way as a communicative tool for young activists, is overwritten by these same activists by the newer understanding that childhood is a time of complex needs, a future-oriented time rather than a timeless period, and a time of worry and anger—emotions and anxieties that should be acted upon rather than soothed. I have focused here on the representation of youth climate activism and on the representational politics these young activists have themselves initiated. However, this chapter does not exist in isolation from the other chapters of this book. There is an interesting intersection between youth climate activism and the narratives about children and nature that continue to emerge within the children’s media industries—and while there is a growing scholarly interest in the practices, motivations, and impact of young climate activists, this intersection is relatively underexplored. Yet as these young activists and their expressive practices change the understanding of children—rewrite childhood, in a sense—media-makers are responding to this shift, and the image of childhood that is written into children’s environmental media is changing as a result. There is an intriguing image evoked in the 2019 Time profile of Greta Thunberg that lingers in my mind as I consider the impact of youth climate activism on the production of children’s media. “Because of her”, the authors write, “hundreds of thousands of teenage ‘Gretas,’ from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead their peers in climate strikes around the world” (Alter et al. 2019). Roberts (2019), writing for Vox, captures a similar image when he writes, simply, that “Greta’s power will be in making more Gretas”. These sentences call to my mind the odd

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image of a factory literally churning out countless artificial Gretas—much like a scene from the science fiction TV series Westworld—who then march out and conquer the adult world; it is wording that, unintentionally, emphasises Thunberg’s strangeness to adults (as though she were a robot, or a talking doll) while also imbuing her with a superhuman quality. I propose that we do indeed see replica Gretas, not marching in the streets— for such an imposition of the ‘girl hero’ frame robs other young activists of their individuality—but inhabiting our screens, our stories, and the spaces of popular culture; and I am certain that we will see more in years to come, particularly within the texts and narratives of children’s media, and particularly because Thunberg’s rise to fame easily fits a familiar narrative structure: as Wallace-Wells writes, the plot points of Greta’s rise could have been lifted from [mythologist] Joseph Campbell: an Everygirl turned reluctant crusader, a dark night of the soul, a forbidding and intrepid journey from the imperial periphery to the very center of global power. (2019)

I have written in this book about the imagined reading position of the curious child, which can be detected in children’s environmental media, but which is vigorously challenged by the semiotic work undertaken by young activists who have rewritten childhood itself. Curiosity is no longer sufficient as a way of understanding the relationship between young media audiences and environmental change. For a start, curiosity is an intellectual response that negates other emotional responses—activism, in turn, makes it allowable or ‘okay’ for children to express fury, grief, or terror in response to the planetary crisis. Arguably, the rise of youth climate activism will also mean that the adult media-maker is no longer the sole liaison between children and these terrible problems, for children are already part of the conversation. In this sense, children’s news, as discussed in Chap. 3, is leading the way by addressing children as an already invested and knowing audience when it comes to environmental problems, rather than as passive or curious learners. This is not to suggest that the makers of children’s media will (or should) respond in a knee-jerk fashion to the rise of youth climate activism. What I would like to recognise here are the entanglements between activism and media when it comes to defining the child and the child/nature relationship.  Mediated representations of the actions of young climate activists have dramatically altered public perceptions of the child/nature relationship, largely by reconfiguring it as a

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relationship between children and environmental problems rather than simply (innocent) children and (pure) ‘nature’. Arguably, too, youth climate activism does not exist in isolation from the decades of storytelling and identity-building practices in children’s media relating to the environment. The representations of the more-than-human world in children’s media have created the beginnings of a story which mythic figures like Greta Thunberg have stepped into and drawn from as well as altered. Thunberg, meanwhile, has retold the story of the young climate warrior in a way that feeds back into the narratives of media and popular culture, so our on-screen children are now more-than-curious: they are angry. And so we start to see the vestiges of the curious child construction dropping away from environmental media, so much so that prominent environmental communicator Naomi Klein writes in her book How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other to (and about) children as young social actors looking for a toolkit for social and political engagement, while the climate change documentary 2040 treats children as experts and consultants as well as members of an intergenerational audience, interviewing them for their perspectives on climate change and even their potential solutions (Hawley and Mocatta 2021). Meanwhile, the young protagonists of the fictional film Wolfwalkers, discussed in Chap. 6, display snarling, tooth-and-claw anger over the injustices perpetrated by adult humans against nature— they are furious, not curious; for Robyn, the hero of this film (and a ‘Greta’ replica), there is no time to be curious, because environmental injustice impacts her suddenly and directly. The film’s wide emotional range, too, indicates a perception that children are thinking and feeling about the human/nature relationship in complex ways, and that media gives space for this complexity, rather than creating a narrow pathway along which to direct the audience’s response to environmental injustice. Lyra Belacqua, too, the child protagonist of the children’s television series His Dark Materials (see Chap. 1), is a character whose similarity to Greta Thunberg is striking: the intelligent and brave child who stands up for what they believe in, acting as the world’s moral compass, speaking with “moral clarity” (words used to describe Thunberg in the Time article), and appearing as a “force of nature” (words used by members of the production team to describe both Thunberg and Lyra; see Flood 2019). The connection between this fictional character and the celebrity image of a real climate activist is difficult to trace. His Dark Materials was based upon the books

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of Philip Pullman, written in the 1990s. The parallels between Lyra and Thunberg may have emerged in the adaptation process, or in the casting of young actor Dafne Keen, who physically resembles Thunberg; these connections are confirmed in the series’ promotional paratexts, where Thunberg is named as the inspiration for the on-screen depiction of Lyra. Meanwhile, as noted in Chap. 5, characters and images from children’s media have a presence in the iconography of youth-led climate strikes. In this sense, children’s media allows us to clearly see how industry and grassroots practices of environmental communication intersect and inform one another—for the actions and identities of characters like Greta Thunberg enter the narratives of popular culture, while the images and characters of popular culture become the raw material with which young people express their identities as activists.

References Alter, Charlotte, Suyin Haynes, and Justin Worland. 2019. Time 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg. Time. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://time. com/person-­of-­the-­year-­2019-­greta-­thunberg/. Amnesty International. n.d. Youth in Our Movement. Accessed October 5, 2021. https://www.amnesty.org.au/youth-­in-­our-­movement/. Anderson, Alison. 2014. Media, Environment and the Network Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barnes, Brendon R. 2021. Reimagining African Women Youth Climate Activism: The Case of Vanessa Nakate. Sustainability 13: 13214. https://doi. org/10.3390/su132313214. Bent, Emily. 2019. Unfiltered and Unapologetic: March for Our Lives and the Political Boundaries of Age. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 11 (2): 55–73. Bergmann, Zoe, and Ringo Ossewaarde. 2020. Youth Climate Activists Meet Environmental Governance: Ageist Depictions of the FFF Movement and Greta Thunberg in German Newspaper Coverage. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 15 (3): 267–290. boyd, danah. 2014. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Brereton, Pat. 2018. Environmental Literacy and New Digital Audiences. London and New York: Routledge. Buckingham, David. 2000. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA: Polity. Camerini, Valentina. 2019. Greta’s Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet. Trans. Moreno Giovannoni. Carlton, VIC: Piccolo Nero.

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Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Power of Identity. Malden and London: Wiley-Blackwell. Climate Sign Archive. n.d. Accessed January 12, 2022. https://www.climatesignarchive.com/. Community Change. 2014. 100 Years of Youth-Led Social Activism. Community Change, April 30. Accessed September 17, 2021. https://communitychange. org/100-­years-­youth-­led-­social-­activism/. Craggs Mersinoglu, Yasemin. 2020. Green Teen Memes: How TikTok Could Save the Planet. The Guardian, August 28. Accessed October 5, 2021. https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/28/green-­t een-­m emes-­ how-­tiktok-­could-­save-­the-­planet-­aoe. Feldman, Hannah R. 2020. Activists as “alternative” Science Communicators: A Rhetorical Perspective on Youth Environmental Activism. Journal of Science Communication 19 (6): 1–10. Flood, Alex. 2019. His Dark Materials: Lyra is like Greta Thunberg, Says Writer Jack Thorne. NME, October 16. Accessed October 13, 2021. https://www. nme.com/news/lyra-­his-­dark-­materials-­jack-­thorne-­greta-­thunberg-­2557557. Gauntlett, David. 2004. Video Critical: A visual, Creative Project in Which Children Made Videos About the Environment. Accessed November 25, 2020. http://www.artlab.org.uk/videocritical/index.htm. Gessen, Masha. 2019. Greta Thunberg is the Anti-Trump. The New  Yorker, September 24. Accessed December 13, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/ news/our-­columnists/greta-­thunberg-­is-­the-­anti-­trump. Giroux, Henry A. 1996. Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of Display. The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 18 (3): 307–331. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 2013. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Red Globe Press. Haßler, Jörg, Anna-Katharina Wurst, Marc Jungblut, and Katharina Schlosser. 2021. Influence of the Pandemic Lockdown on Fridays for Future’s Hashtag Activism. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211026575. Hautea, Samantha, Perry Parks, Bruno Takahashi, and Jing Zeng. 2021. Showing they Care (or don’t): Affective Publics and Ambivalent Climate Activism on TikTok. Social Media + Society 7 (2): 1–14. Hawley, Erin, and Gabi Mocatta. 2021. “Fact-based dreaming” as Climate Communication. Popular Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15405702.2021.1994576. Hawley, Erin, Katrina Clifford, and Claire Konkes. 2018. The “Rosie Batty effect” and the Framing of Family Violence in Australian News Media. Journalism Studies 19 (15): 2304–2323. Hinchliffe, Jean. 2021. Lead the Way: How to Change the World, From a Teen Activist and School Striker. Sydney: Pantera Press.

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Holland, Patricia. 1992. What is a Child? Popular Images of Childhood. London: Virago. Hopkins, Peter. 2010. Young People, Place and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Ito, Mizuko, Heather Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G.  Lange, C.  J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson, with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Z.  Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp. 2009. Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: The MIT Press. Jarvis, Brooke. 2020. The Teenagers at the End of the World. The New York Times, July 21. Accessed September 1, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/21/magazine/teenage-­activist-­climate-­change.html. Jenkins, Henry. 2016. Youth Voice, Media, and Political Engagement: Introducing the Core Concepts. In By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, ed. Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-­ Vilenchick, and Arely M.  Zimmerman, 1–60. New  York: New  York University Press. Kenya, Evelyn. 2020. Outrage at Whites-only Image as Ugandan Climate Activist Cropped from Photo. The Guardian, January 26. Accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/24/whites-­only-­photo-­ uganda-­climate-­activist-­vanessa-­nakate. King, Donna Lee. 1994. Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Kids, Environmental Crisis, and Competing Narratives of the New World Order. The Sociological Quarterly 35 (1): 103–120. Kitzinger, Jenny. 2007. Framing and Frame Analysis. In Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates, ed. Eoin Devereux, 134–161. London, Los Angeles, Singapore, and New Dehli: SAGE. Kollmuss, Anja, and Julian Agyeman. 2002. Mind the Gap: Why Do People Act Environmentally and What are the Barriers to Pro-environmental Behavior? Environmental Education Research 8 (3): 239–260. Lawson, Danielle F., Kathryn T. Stevenson, M. Nils Peterson, Sarah K. Carrier, Renee Strnad, and Erin Seekamp. 2018. Intergenerational Learning: Are Children Key in Spurring Climate Action? Global Environmental Change 53: 204–208. Lertzman, Renee. 2015. Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. London and New York: Routledge. Lipstein, Emily. 2019. Climate Change Memes for Angry and Terrified Teens. Gizmodo Australia, September 30. Accessed March 6, 2020. https://www.gizmodo. com.au/2019/09/climate-­change-­memes-­for-­angry-­and-­terrified-­teens/. Louv, Richard. 2010. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-­ Deficit Disorder. London: Atlantic Books.

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Margolin, Jamie. 2020. Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. New York: Hachette Books. Meyer, Robinson. 2019. Why Greta Makes Adults Uncomfortable. The Atlantic, September 23. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/why-­greta-­wins/598612/. Pattee, Emma. 2021. Meet the Climate Change Activists of TikTok. Wired, March 11. Accessed October 5, 2021. https://www.wired.com/story/ climate-­change-­tiktok-­science-­communication/. Raby, Rebecca, and Lindsay C.  Sheppard. 2021. Constructs of Childhood, Generation and Heroism in Editorials on Young People’s Climate Change Activism: Their Mobilisation and Effects. Children and Society 35: 380–394. Rexha, Bebe. 2019. Hey @GretaThunberg this Song is Dedicated to You. Twitter, September 26. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://twitter.com/beberexha/status/1177045360163860480. Roberts, David. 2019. Why the Right’s Usual Smears Don’t Work on Greta Thunberg. Vox, December 12. Accessed April 14, 2021. https://www.vox. com/energy-­a nd-­e nvironment/2019/9/26/20882958/greta-­t hunberg-­ climate-­change-­trump-­attacks-­right-­wing. Sabherwal, Anandita, Matthew T. Ballew, Sander van der Linden, Abel Gustafson, Matthew H. Goldberg, Edward W. Maibach, John E. Kotcher, Janet K. Swim, Seth A.  Rosenthal, and Anthony Leiserowitz. 2021. The Greta Thunberg Effect: Familiarity with Greta Thunberg predicts intentions to engage in climate activism in the United States. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 51: 321–333. Shapiro, Ari, Mia Venkat, Noah Caldwell, and Ashley Brown. 2021. For Brianna Fruean, the Smell of Mud Drives Home the Need for Climate Action. Blue Ridge Public Radio, November 11. Accessed December 3, 2021. https:// www.bpr.org/post/brianna-­fruean-­smell-­mud-­drives-­home-­need-­climate-­ action#stream/0. Sorce, Giuliana, and Delia Dumitrica. 2021. # fighteverycrisis: Pandemic Shifts in Fridays for Future’s Protest Communication Frames. Environmental Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2021.1948435. The Guardian. 2019. Greta Thunberg’s “how dare you” Speech Performed by Megan Washington and Robert Davidson. The Guardian, December 9. Accessed November 25, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ video/2019/dec/09/greta-­thunbergs-­how-­dare-­you-­speech-­performed-­by-­ megan-­washington-­and-­robert-­davidson-­video. Thew, Harriet, Lucie Middlemiss, and Jouni Paavola. 2020. “Youth is Not a Political Position”: Exploring Justice Claims-Making in the UN Climate Change Negotiations. Global Environmental Change 61: 1–10. Thunberg, Greta. 2018. Speech to COP24. Poland, December 4. ———. 2019a. Speech to the United Nations Climate Action Summit. New York, September 23.

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———. 2019b. Speech to the World Economic Forum. Davos, January 25. UN News. 2021. COP26: Thousands of Young People Take Over Glasgow Streets Demanding Climate Action. United Nations, November 5. Accessed November 7, 2021. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/11/1105042. Varghese, Sanjana. 2019. How Kids Organised One of The world’s Largest Climate Protests. Wired, March 15. Accessed June 11, 2019. https://www. wired.co.uk/article/climate-­change-­strike-­protest-­children-­social-­media. Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. It’s Greta’s World, But It’s Still Burning—The Extraordinary Rise of a 16-year-old, and Her Hail Mary Climate Movement. New York, September 17. Accessed November 7, 2021. https://nymag.com/ intelligencer/2019/09/greta-­thunberg-­climate-­change-­movement.html. Wild Things. 2020. Directed by Sally Ingleton. 360 Degree Films. Winograd, Ken. 2016. Teaching in Times of Environmental Crises: What on Earth are Elementary Teachers to do? In Education in Times of Environmental Crises: Teaching Children to Be Agents of Change, ed. Ken Winograd, 3–13. London: Routledge. Wright, Jennifer. 2019. These anti-Greta Thunberg Criticisms are Almost Hilarious. Harpers Bazaar, September 26. Accessed November 4, 2021. https://www. harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a29236192/greta-­thunberg-­criticism/. Youth Unstoppable. 2018. Directed by Slater Jewell-Kemker. Connect4Climate, Reckless Films, and Scythia Films.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-Human World

This book has explored the nexus between children, media, and the environment at a time defined by the “triple crises” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation (United Nations Environment Programme 2021), when increasingly, communicators and thought leaders are recognising the role young people might play in long-term societal change relating to the more-than-human world. Through the various case studies in this book, I have sought to address a question that has hitherto received little scholarly attention in studies of environmental communication: where do children feature in the environmental politics of the twenty-­ first century, and how is this impacting the production of children’s media and the narratives and representational patterns at work in children’s media products? As this book has shown, children have long been an important market for environmentally themed media, but recent years have seen a proliferation of environmental media texts and products for young audiences, along with a growing recognition of children as audiences for environmental messages. Just as environmental communicators like Naomi Klein and organisations like the United Nations are now developing environmental content specifically for young readers and audiences (see Chap. 1), the makers of children’s news (Chap. 3), television (Chap. 4), and film (Chaps. 5 and 6) are increasingly incorporating content about the environmental crisis into the products and stories they create, or into the paratexts and transmedia extensions that support and surround these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Hawley, Environmental Communication for Children, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_8

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products and stories. They are doing so for two reasons. Firstly, there is a long-held cultural assumption that children have an inherent connection to nature and are interested in the more-than-human world—that ‘the environment’ is a topic of interest for young audiences (Phenice and Griffore 2003; Coward 1990; Bell 2014). Secondly, as the environmental crisis deepens, media-makers feel a sense of obligation to raise environmental issues within the stories they tell or use these stories to normalise pro-environmental behaviour (BAFTA Albert 2021). This environmental ethic encompasses the production of children’s media, and resultantly, we are likely to see a deeper pervasion of environmental themes in children’s media and a further proliferation of environmental media texts for children in the coming years. This also means that children’s environmental media has itself become an important factor in the contemporary construction of childhood. As explored throughout this book, children’s media is unique due to the gap between those who produce it and those who consume it: a very pronounced and specific gap defined by age and also by access, expertise, and social privilege (Buckingham 1995: 47; Rose 1984: 1–2). As adult media practitioners seek to understand, engage, and/or ‘do well by’ their child target audiences, they make assumptions about childhood, its limits, and its defining qualities. Debates about childhood innocence still inform much of the public discussion about children and nature (see Chap. 2), and at times, the myth of the innocent child guides and informs the process of creating and adapting environmental content for children, leading to simplification (Chap. 3) or an unwillingness to explore the complexities behind pro-environmental behaviour (Chap. 4). What I have shown throughout this book, though, is that simplification and imagined innocence does not define the process of creating environmental media for young audiences—there are other radical transformations and textual strategies being adopted by media-makers who seek to engage children on environmental issues. Referring to long-standing notions of childhood innocence and their impact on environmental education, Iris Duhn writes that “rethinking childhood has to be a core aspect of eco-focused pedagogies” (2012: 21); so too have media-makers needed to ‘rethink’ childhood when addressing young audiences about environmental themes, and as I have argued in this book, this ‘rethinking’ project will be ongoing as new conceptualisations of the child/nature relationship begin to shape the production of children’s media. It is my hope that children’s media, in turn, will also lead to changes in thinking about the child/nature relationship. At the same time, it is likely that the commercial imperatives of

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children’s media will continue to inform a commodification of environmental content, a “selling” of environmentalism to children (King 1994: 108), and a persistence of thematic patterns whereby nature is simplified, anthropomorphised, and depicted as a resource for human use. While this book has attempted to shine a light on the radical and transformative aspects of children’s culture, it also acknowledges that children’s stories have long been objects of adult attempts to colonise and control childhood—they have been adapted and altered to suit adult needs, particularly through the process of ‘Disneyfication’, or through the positioning of children as markets for commercial media (Buckingham and Tingstad 2010; Kapur 2005). This book has shown that adult media-makers often imagine a ‘curious child’ as their inscribed audience. A deconstruction of the myth of the ‘curious child’ has been an important throughline in the preceding chapters. Stemming from the aforementioned assumption that children have an inherent connection to nature, the curious child myth is, to a certain extent, productive because it allows environmental issues to be made present for very young audiences and age-appropriate environmental content to be developed. It is for this reason that media texts for pre-school-aged children, such as the television programmes Sesame Street, Blue Peter, and Play School (see Chap. 4), have so successfully incorporated environmental themes and played a role in the development of environmental literacies. I do not dispute the usefulness of the curious child construct, but nevertheless, I am wary of it and believe it deserves more critical investigation, particularly when it is articulated by industry stakeholders as a desirable reading position in itself (rather than a capacity, skill, or mode of engagement employed by a complex and multifaceted audience). Curiosity can be less about granting children access to environmental themes and topics, and more about creating a buffer between young audiences and the harsh realities of the environmental crisis, useful to adults who want to engage children on such topics but are worried about evoking fear or confusion. When treated like a shield, curiosity is a problem. Interpreted in this way, the trope of the curious child is closely aligned with the myth of childhood innocence and is equally blank and empty (Kincaid 1998), ready to be woven into signification patterns that suit adults. Indeed, the ‘curious child’ is also a market position constructed by children’s media, as well as a commodity that can be marketed and sold to parents, a reassurance that certain media products are desirable and beneficial for the children on whose behalf they are purchasing. Curiosity, as discussed in Chap. 4, is

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also a construct that allows adults to facilitate (and control) the child’s relationship with environmental issues; it is an endorsement of adult authority as well as a means of ensuring that young audiences aren’t exposed to too much, too quickly. Arguably, the assumption that children have an automatic or inbuilt curiosity about environmental issues does little to foster child-nature connectedness or environmental sensitivity. Scholars of media literacy have pointed out that children do not ‘naturally’ acquire media literacy skills and competencies through media use—this is a myth that needs to be countered and resisted before any headway is made in addressing the digital divide, the participation gap, or problems like misinformation (Jenkins 2009: 15; boyd 2014: 177). Environmental literacy deserves similar consideration. Curiosity alone does not lead to the development of environmental literacies, and when a media text constructs an image of the ‘curious child’, this image itself can occlude rather than reveal the skills and competencies needed as part of the development of environmental literacies. Importantly, a display of curiosity is not the same as investment and participation in the tackling of problems like climate change, although it is sometimes assumed that curiosity about nature will lead ‘naturally’ to such investment and participation after childhood—so that children can remain sheltered from the environmental crisis and can be citizens-in-waiting until they ‘come of age’. Media is therefore playing a crucial role in shaping the child/nature relationship by mapping ideal behaviour for children in response to environmental problems. Care and curiosity in particular are seen as the ideal character traits for young people, and such behaviour is seen as the key to restoring a ‘pure’ environment. However, what I have shown in this book is that children’s environmental media can be so much more than a process of marketing environmentalism to the ‘curious child’ and selling the curious child to parents; children’s environmental media can do so much more than provoke or evoke curiosity, and many of the texts analysed in this book are at their most productive when they move beyond the trope of the curious child. If we look beyond innocence and curiosity, we find that childhood can be defined—even mythically—by other qualities: play, imagination, experimentation, and transgression. Because of these qualities, children’s media provides a space where the climate crisis can be tackled in innovative and productive ways, as I have shown in the preceding chapters. This makes it pertinent to ask not just what children can learn from environmental communication, but what environmental

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communicators and analysts can learn from children’s media, from children’s media-makers, and from children themselves. And there is much to be learned, from the playful strategy of the sidelong glance at climate change in children’s film, or the use of fantasy or worldbuilding strategies to interweave environmental thematics into children’s texts; from the importance of paratexts and transmedia extensions in either foregrounding or disrupting environmental messages; from the solutions-focused approach of children’s news, the child-led, ‘de-schoolified’ depiction of sustainability in Project Planet, the creation of environmental empathy through a non-human way of seeing in Wolfwalkers and, of course, the boundary-crossing strategies of young climate communicators themselves. The power of the child’s-eye view is itself worthy of attention from environmental communication scholars and practitioners, because its positivity, playfulness, and willingness to embrace non-human perspectives can invoke a radical rethinking of accepted norms. Such textual and representational strategies also take us beyond the “nature deficit disorder” (Louv 2010), which positions media as a culprit and a problem, a major player in the removal of children from the natural world. When we shift attention from the effects of media on children to the meanings made in children’s media texts (Jenkins 2006, 2009), we find that media may inform children about environmental problems, strengthen environmental literacies, or encourage environmental empathy. We may also find that media constructs children as green consumers and positions them in markets—at the same time, we may find that media equips children with tools and resources for participation in environmental activism. The transmedia quality of children’s culture, moreover, leads to intricate connections between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences with nature, from the development of an app that asks children to interact with their favourite media characters outside in the natural world (Hawley 2018), to the foregrounding of environmental themes in the promotion of children’s media texts, to the propensity of children themselves to remake the signs of popular culture when they participate in climate activism—and when they play. Taking stock of these complexities, what is clear is that both the nature deficit disorder and the curious child construct are insufficient explanations for the way media can contribute to children’s environmental literacy or the various ways young people are using media to communicate about the environment. I began this book with reference to an image of a child, a specific child: the grandchild of an adult speaker at a political event. As the mediated

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image of this child reminds us, children today are symbols or emblems of environmental action—a sign that we are doing something, or that we must do something, about the planetary crisis. Children and childhood have always been easy symbols to call on in this and other ‘grown-up’ discussions about the state of the world. However, the signification practices around children and the environment have begun to shift in dramatic ways. Youth climate activism and the semiotic work of young communicators have ensured that children are now considered rights-holders and thought leaders as well as victims and passive sources of inspiration in a world beset by ecological disaster. Certainly, the environmental crisis is an issue that involves children, intersects with childhood, and has propelled children onto the world stage as communicators, arguably like no other issue in history. Not all young climate activists are children, and not all children are able to participate in the communicative and ideological work of activism, but importantly, the young people who communicate about environmental problems are also creating media that children consume. Children’s media consumption is diverse in the digital age, and today’s children might well watch episodes of their favourite television programme alongside TikToks or YouTube videos made by other young people: therefore, they too are important audiences for the grassroots content created by youth climate activists. Moreover, as I have shown, the narratives of youth-led climate activism are imprinting on children’s media. In normalising an alternative child/nature relationship (one that involves anger, fighting, and frustration—one that displaces adult authority), these youth-­ led social movements are making space in children’s media for new narratives about child agency; and it is likely that we have only seen the beginning of a cycle of children’s media production informed and inspired by the work of young activists. In the midst of these changing representational patterns, Environmental Communication for Children has affirmed that we must acknowledge and respect the complexities of the relationship between children, media, and the more-than-human world.

References BAFTA Albert. 2021. Planet Placement. Accessed October 3, 2021. https://wearealbert.org/editorial/. Bell, Alice. 2014. What Shall We Tell the Children? In Culture and Climate Change: Narratives, ed. Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk, and Robert Butler, 37–44. Cambridge, UK: Shed.

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boyd, danah. 2014. It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Buckingham, David. 1995. On the Impossibility of Children’s Television: The Case of Timmy Mallett. In In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences, ed. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, 47–61. London: British Film Institute. Buckingham, David, and Vebjørg Tingstad. 2010. Introduction. In Childhood and Consumer Culture, ed. David Buckingham and Vebjørg Tingstad, 1–16. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Coward, Rosalind. 1990. Greening the Child. New Statesman and Society 3 (102): 40–41. Duhn, Iris. 2012. Making “place” for Ecological Sustainability in Early Childhood Education. Environmental Education Research 18 (1): 19–29. Hawley, Erin. 2018. Children’s Television, Environmental Pedagogy and the (un) Natural World of dirtgirlworld. Continuum 32 (2): 162–172. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York and London: New York University Press. ———. 2009. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kapur, Jyotsna. 2005. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Kincaid, James. 1998. Erotic innocence. Durham: Duke University Press. King, Donna Lee. 1994. Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Kids, Environmental Crisis, and Competing Narratives of the New World Order. The Sociological Quarterly 35 (1): 103–120. Louv, Richard. 2010. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-­ Deficit Disorder. London: Atlantic Books. Phenice, Lillian A., and Robert J. Griffore. 2003. Young Children and the Natural World. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 4 (2): 167–171. Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. United Nations Environment Programme. 2021. Making Peace with Nature: A Scientific Blueprint to Tackle the Climate, Biodiversity and Pollution Emergencies. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://www.unep.org/resources/making-­ peace-­nature.

Index

A ABC, the, 14, 71, 72, 118 ABC News, 79 Abram, David, 5, 8 Access to childhood, 210 to information, 66, 73, 83, 225 to media, 43, 50, 97, 133; production, 192, 197 to nature, 10, 13, 31, 44, 45, 155, 201 to sources of news, 77, 209 Activism, 55, 146, 192 Adani coal mine, 146 Adaptation, 66, 81–83, 87, 127, 133, 144, 147, 162, 218 Adult understanding of childhood, 9, 13, 36, 85, 95, 110, 114, 205, 214 Advertising, 54, 125, 145, 189 Affective response to nature, 163, 172

Agency, 52, 75, 143, 189, 199, 205, 209, 228 Andocentricism, 130, 134, 135 Animals, 47, 69, 73, 104–108, 113, 127–129, 148, 166, 173 as characters in children’s media, 22, 100, 134, 162 in children’s literature, 12, 127, 134 in children’s news, 73, 74 perspectives of, 74, 81, 128, 134 rights, 74, 131, 164 Animation, 5, 129, 144, 157 Anthropocentricism, 45, 100, 130–132, 138, 171, 180 Anthropomorphism, 104, 128, 130, 132, 225 Attenborough, Sir David, 4, 156 Attribution of responsibility frame, 80 Authenticity, 143, 144, 159, 173, 195, 205, 210 Avatar, 137, 145, 162

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INDEX

B BAFTA, 21, 99 Balance as bias, 70, 77 Bambi, 129–132, 148, 158, 159 Bastida, Xiye, 204 BBC, the, 48, 71, 72, 99, 118 BBC News, 79, 80 Behaviour adult, 118, 212 audience, 39 and awareness, 190 child, 205, 209 pro-environmental, 10, 15, 21, 48, 74, 95, 105, 107–110, 117, 147, 214, 224 Behind the News (BTN), 70–82, 84 Bettelheim, Bruno, 141 Biden, Joe, 208 Big Blue, 101 Biodiversity, 42, 47, 70, 79–82, 89, 131, 164, 170, 173, 178, 181, 182, 196 Biophilia, 37, 43, 163 Blue Peter, 102, 225 Boyd, danah, 52 Branding, 42, 126, 136, 144, 147, 202, 210 Brereton, Pat, 50, 99, 126, 149 Brooker, Charlie, 99 Buckingham, David, 68, 83, 102, 211 C Cable News Network (CNN), 71 Captain Planet and the Planeteers, 101, 102, 104, 109 Care for nature, 10, 31, 74, 88, 107, 108, 115, 117, 127, 131, 142, 156, 157, 178, 190 Carson, Rachel, 9, 13, 52, 108, 132, 149, 156 Case study analysis, 20 Castells, Manuel, 191

Chawla, Louise, 7, 10, 11, 42, 117 Child/adult boundary, 18, 190, 203, 208, 210–214 Child and Nature Network, 34, 38 Childhood (definitions of), 8–9 Child/nature relationship, 9–13 Children’s film, 3, 23, 43, 46, 123–149 Children’s literature, 11, 12, 96, 127, 161, 167 Children’s magazines, 3, 12, 47 Children’s news, 65–89, 96, 107, 166–167, 216, 227 Children’s television, 95–118 Children’s rights, 2, 76, 209, 228 Child’s-eye view, 87, 128, 227 Chthulucene, 167 Citizen scientists, 41 Climate activism, 72, 81, 84, 88, 146, 194, 227 Climate change, 2, 4, 6, 14, 36, 69, 101, 174, 180, 189, 193, 197, 199, 207, 209, 215, 223, 226 in children’s film, 133, 135, 139–142, 148 in children’s news, 72, 74, 75 in children’s television, 21, 100, 101, 118 effects on children, 2 and misinformation, 47 mitigation campaigns, 2 in news, 69–71, 195 in television, 99, 100 Climate literacy, 53, 214 Climate strikes, 71, 75, 100, 145, 146, 208, 218 CNN, see Cable News Network CNN 10, 70–79, 84, 85, 107 Commercial imperatives of children’s media, 46, 48, 97, 125, 224–225 Commercialisation of childhood, 46, 125, 145

 INDEX 

Computer-generated imagery (CGI), 138, 156, 157 Conservation, 3, 41, 42, 72, 74, 127, 129, 171, 173, 182 Constructive journalism, 86 Convergence, 42, 43 COP24, 213 COP26, 1, 6, 15, 18, 72, 75, 204, 214 COVID-19 pandemic, 44, 45, 97, 195, 214 Coward, Rosalind, 3, 12, 72, 101, 224 Cowell, Cressida, 160, 162, 170, 181 Critical reception, 23, 162, 168 Critical thinking, 51, 98, 109, 111, 114 Cross-promotion, 144, 147 Cubitt, Sean, 126, 130 Cultivation theory, 45 Cultural resource, 146 Curious child, 95, 118, 141, 169, 216, 217, 225, 226 D Deforestation, 87, 101, 106, 107, 137 Digital divide, 226 Digital natives, 32 Dirtgirlworld, 101 Disney, 23, 44, 125, 129–133, 135, 140, 141, 159 Disneyfication, 23, 65, 137, 165, 225 Doc McStuffins, 101 Documentary, 202, 217 Dora the Explorer, 101 Drought, 84 Dumbing down, 65 E Earth Guardians, 193 Eco-anxiety, 2, 81, 199, 207 Ecocinema, 124–127, 133, 144, 148, 149

233

Ecoliteracy, 53, 54 Ecological literacies, 52, 53, 88 EcoMaths, 101 Ecopiety, 176 Education, 88 environmental, 103 informal, 104 Minecraft and, 173 science, 113 for sustainability, 103 Edutainment, 20, 102, 111, 114, 123 Efficacy, personal, 56, 73, 88, 95, 118, 124, 155, 193, 196 Emile, 9 Emotion, 81, 85–87, 163, 164, 169, 179, 208, 213, 216, 217 Empathy, 14, 15, 56, 74, 128, 131, 149, 155, 159, 164–166, 179, 180, 227 Environmental activism, 5, 74, 191, 194, 201, 227 Environmental communication, 4–6, 24, 45, 98, 145, 157, 159, 163, 165, 169, 172, 190, 223 Environmental impact of media, 4, 174 Environmental literacy, 17, 52, 54, 55, 83, 88, 118, 149, 155, 169, 171, 178, 179, 181, 225, 226 Environmental sensitivity, 56, 155, 156, 159, 179, 226 Environmental stewardship, 74, 95, 127 Environmental virtue ethics, 108, 109, 176 Episodic vs. thematic framing, 68 Extinction Rebellion, 194 F Facebook, 195, 197, 198 Fans, 115, 147, 162, 176, 181, 182 Fantastic Mr Fox, 128

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INDEX

Fantasy, 22, 23, 84, 137, 139, 141, 148, 162, 163, 171, 180, 181, 227 Fatboy Slim, 198 Favreau, Jon, 133–138 FernGully The Last Rainforest, 3, 125 Finding Nemo, 128, 132, 148 Fiske, John, 146, 175 Framing, 46, 68, 75, 76, 199, 204–210 Franchise, media, 42, 97, 147, 162, 181 Fridays for Future, 5, 15, 193, 195 Frozen, 139 Frozen II, 124, 139–142, 148 Fruean, Brianna, 6, 194, 199, 200 G Gauntlett, David, 100, 212 Generational amnesia, 16, 131 Girl hero frame, 207, 208, 210 Giroux, Henry, 194, 200, 203 González, Emma, 193 Green consumers, 5, 201, 227 Green Hour, 34 Greenwashing, 47, 54, 124 Guardian, The, 70, 135, 145, 198, 204 H Hall, Stuart, 209 Happy Feet, 133 Haraway, Donna, 8, 167 Hinchliffe, Jean, 202, 203 His Dark Materials, 21, 22, 217 Hobbs, Renee, 50, 52, 54 Hollywood, 125, 126, 162 Horror, 141, 167 How to Train Your Dragon, 160–164, 169, 170, 180

Human/nature relationship, 8, 128, 131, 132, 137, 139, 160, 164, 167, 169, 174, 191, 217 Humour, 74, 104, 110, 196 I Ice Age films, 133 Identity, 9, 34, 111, 117, 146, 171, 176, 177, 190, 203, 206 Indigenous rights, 140 Information deficit disorder, 113 Innocence, 18, 39, 48, 52, 68, 113, 114, 201, 202, 206, 207, 215, 224, 225 Instagram, 193, 195, 197 Instrumental value of nature, 106, 172 Intergenerational justice, 6, 14, 15, 19, 75, 76, 114, 190, 209 Intrinsic value of nature, 106, 138, 158 IPBES report on global biodiversity, 71, 79–82 IPCC, 101, 102, 175 J Jenkins, Henry, 40, 181, 192, 197 Journalism, 82, 86–88 Jungle Book, The children’s stories, 134 1967 film, 135 2016 film, 133–138, 144, 148, 157, 158 K Kahn, Peter, 16, 131 Kellert, Stephen, 155, 156, 163 Kincaid, James, 40, 85 Kipling, Rudyard, 133–137 Klein, Naomi, 4, 217, 223

 INDEX 

Knowledge about the environment, 42, 55, 88 Knowledge deficit disorder, 52, 103, 214 Kyoto Protocol, 101 L Last Child in the Woods, 33, 35 Leopold, Aldo, 165 Lertzman, Renee, 190 Let’s Play videos, 176, 182 Local issues, 47, 117, 118 López, Antonio, 55 Lorax, The, 142–147 Lord of the Rings films, 126, 213 Loss of nature, 11, 15–17, 178 Lost Words (book), 17 Louv, Richard, 7, 10, 33–39, 97, 144 M March for Our Lives, 192, 193, 200 Margolin, Jamie, 194, 199, 201–203 Marine pollution, 105, 110, 113 Martinez, Xiuhtezcatl, 194 Mazda, 145, 147 McKibben, Bill, 7, 8, 15, 36, 158 Media effects, 24, 33, 39–40, 48–49, 51, 52, 198, 227 Media literacy, 49–56, 67, 88, 178, 181, 226 Mediatisation of childhood, 32, 49 Medical metaphors, 52 Memes, 142, 195 Memory, 13–17 Minecraft, 170–178, 181, 182 Misinformation, 47, 48, 50–52, 77, 226 Miyazaki, Hayao, 158, 160 Moana, 21, 24, 124, 139–142, 149, 157

235

MockCOP26, 214 Modding, 175, 181 Mode of address, 77–79, 134, 164, 203 Monster, 167 Mothers of Invention podcast, 204 Music, 42, 81, 191, 197, 204 N Nakate, Vanessa, 208 National Geographic, 148, 196 National Geographic Kids, 78 Nature (definitions of), 6–8 Nature cam networks, 45 Nature deficit disorder, 33–39, 43, 44, 50, 97, 144, 169, 198, 227 Nature Play Australia, 38, 41 Nature 2.0, 41 Netflix, 43, 44, 133 News, 65–89, 192, 196, 206–210 and environment, 69–70 media literacies, 54 sources, 76, 77, 80; children as, 75, 76, 84 values, 68, 69, 71 Newsround, 69–82, 84, 89 New York Times, 44, 201 Nostalgia, 23, 36 O Octonauts, The, 104–108, 113 On-demand culture, 43, 44 Oral history, 17 Orr, David, 52, 53, 164 Outdoor activities, 18, 33, 34, 37, 38, 42, 97, 174 P Pacific Island nations, 140, 199 Parasocial relations, 104, 108

236 

INDEX

Paratexts, 22, 103, 114, 138, 145, 148, 169, 174, 177, 179, 181, 218, 227 Parham, John, 5, 69, 95, 98, 171 Participatory culture, 5, 49, 192, 197 Peltier, Autumn, 194 Planet Ark, 34 Plastic waste, 36, 46, 73, 78, 81, 105, 115, 133 Play children’s, 37, 42, 138, 163, 174, 177, 180, 181 in nature, 31, 33, 34, 37, 174 sense of, 78, 79, 82, 84, 110, 111, 167, 177, 180, 206, 226, 227 in virtual worlds, 176 Play School, 102, 103, 225 Podcasts, 3, 41, 204 Pokémon, 41–43, 146 Polar bears, 21, 47, 51, 173 Policy change, 33, 47, 53, 190 Politicians, 206 as news sources, 77 Positive effects of media, 48 Positivity, 24, 81, 85, 86, 227 Primary definers, 77, 209 Princess Mononoke, 125, 160 Producerly texts, 175 Product tie-ins, 46, 144, 147, 162 Pro-environmental communication, 24, 124, 141, 143, 147 Project Planet, 21, 115–118, 227 Protectionist stance, 52 S Screen time, 5, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 123 Sense of wonder, 15, 44, 132, 164 Sense of Wonder, The, 9, 13 Sesame Street, 102–104, 225

Sesame Workshop, 102, 112 Sharma, Alok, 204 Silent Spring, 9 Simplification, 46, 65, 84, 85, 87, 89, 96, 141, 224 Smoggies, The, 108, 109 Snow White, 130, 131 Social media, 4, 17, 47, 115, 142, 195 Solastalgia, 15 Sponsorship, see Cross-promotion Storytelling, 131, 149, 159, 200 Streaming, 44, 45, 99 Studio Ghibli, 158, 160 Sunrise Movement, 193 Superheroes, 4, 75, 101, 103 Sustainability, 4, 15, 21, 46, 72, 101–103, 116, 147, 177, 182, 189, 227 Sustainability literacy, 53 Suzuki, David, 70, 189, 190 T Television, 95–118 and environment, 98–99 negative effects of, 37, 39 Textual analysis, 20 Thunberg, Greta, 5, 6, 22, 114, 170, 192–218 TikTok, 97, 195, 196, 228 Time magazine, 194, 198, 207, 210, 211, 215 Timmermans, Frans, 1, 6, 15, 18, 76 Toxic childhood (myth of), 39 Toys, 97, 110, 130, 162 Transmedia storytelling, 17, 22, 42, 147, 227 Trump, Donald, 205 Twitter, 195, 197, 198, 205 2040, 217

 INDEX 

U UNICEF, 2, 47 United Nations, 2, 4, 194, 223 United Nations Climate Action Summit, 194, 198, 204, 205, 213 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 8 United Nations Youth Climate Summit, 145, 194 Universal Studios, 143–145 Urbanisation, 31, 43, 155 Utilitarian ideologies, 35, 179

Washington, Megan, 204 Waste management, 72, 73 We Bare Bears, 110–111 Wild Kratts, 105–108, 112–115 Wildlife documentary, 43–45, 123, 156, 158, 159, 176 Wolfwalkers, 164–170, 179, 180, 217, 227 Wolves, 165, 168 Worldbuilding, 22, 227 World Wildlife Fund, 173, 181

V Vicarious nature experiences, 19, 155, 156, 163 Videogames, 41, 97, 157, 170–178 green, 171 Virtual worlds, 171, 177, 178 Visual effects, 133, 137, 138

Y Youth climate activism, 19, 75, 76, 100, 117, 189, 193, 198, 201, 202, 204–210, 215, 228 YouTube, 38, 44, 49, 97, 176, 189, 228 YouTubers, 176, 177, 198

W Wall.E, 125, 132, 160 Wallace-Wells, David, 210, 216

Z Zero Hour, 194 Zootopia, 130

237