Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 1793653267, 9781793653260

Citation preview

Praise for Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media “Bringing an intermedial approach to the study of a wide range of ecomedia, Intermedial Ecocriticism adds a much-needed perspective to the larger discourse around representation and reception within the environmental humanities. It presents a comprehensive theory and method that allows us to systematically compare different media products representing climate change and other environmental crises without losing sight of their specific affordances and potential ecological agency.” —Alexa Weik von Mossner, author of Affective Ecologies

“An accessible and timely contribution to the ever-growing conversation on texts and media in the environmental humanities. This much-needed book makes an original case for an intermedial approach to textual analysis and also provides new avenues for environmental and science communication.” — Roman Bartosch, University of Cologne

“Intermedial Ecocriticism offers an inspiring take on the question of why the dramatic scientific data on the climate crisis has not yet resulted in massive global action. The writers argue that the reason lies not in the much-repeated claim that the climate crisis would just be too overwhelming to be represented; instead, they defend the need for a nuanced, intermedial understanding of the reasons why the existing representations succeed, or fail, to convince. This book offers just such an understanding. A crystal clear set of intermedial analyses yields detailed insights in what different popular and artistic ecomedia can, and simply cannot, do to move and mobilize their audiences. The book is a great inspiration for all those who want to understand, or improve, the role of media in the climate crisis.” —Isabel Hoving, Leiden University

Intermedial Ecocriticism

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Katarina Leppänen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

Recent Titles Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media, by Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose Ibero-American Ecocriticism: Cultural and Social Explorations, edited by J. Manuel Gómez Animal Texts: Critical Animal Concepts for American Environmental Literature, by Lauren E. Perry-Rummel The Cultural Roots of Slow Food: Peasants, Partisans, and the Landscape of Italian Resistance, by Ilaria Tabusso-Marcyan The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism, edited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives, edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh, and Samit Kumar Maiti An Ibero-American Perspective on Narratives of Pandemics, edited by Zélia M. Bora, Animesh Roy, and Ricardo Ballesteros de la Fuente The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest: Uncanny Encounters, by Stacy Hoult The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II, by Dilek Bulut Sarikaya Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871, by Nicole C. Dittmer Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism, by Keita Hatooka

Intermedial Ecocriticism The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media

Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bruhn, Jørgen, author. | Salmose, Niklas, author. Title: Intermedial ecocriticism : the climate crisis through art and media / Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Ecocritical theory and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023040515 (print) | LCCN 2023040516 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793653260 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793653277 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Intermediality. | Mass media and the environment. | Mass media and literature. | Mass media and the arts. Classification: LCC PN98.E36 B74 2024 (print) | LCC PN98.E36 (ebook) | DDC 809.9336—dc23/eng/20230928 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040515 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040516 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction 1 1 Intermedial Studies

15

2 Intermedial Ecocriticism

35

3 From Climate Science to Agency?

57

4 Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

77

5 Future Food Cultures

109

6 Roads to Ecological Agency

135

Afterword 165 Bibliography169 Index 187 About the Authors

201

vii

Acknowledgments

In early 2020, we were approached by Judith Lakamper, associate acquisitions editor for cultural studies, gender studies, and Jewish studies at Lexington Books. She had read some of our work in environmental humanities and was curious to see whether our analyses of ecomedia and intermediality bore the marks of a larger, book-length project that we could develop together. Once we became more specific about our aims, the project was handed over to Kasey Beduhn, former acquisitions editor for the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, and Courtney Morales, acquisitions editor for sociology, music, and environmental studies. The early encouragement and continued support from the editors at Lexington have been fundamental in initiating and moving this project forward, so many thanks to them all. Once we had a book to write, we quickly zoomed in on our mutual concern regarding how the ecological and climate crisis is being mediated. From our position in the generously funded Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), we have become increasingly interested in what intermedial studies can offer the environmental humanities. We wish to express particular gratitude to the former and current vice-chancellors of Linnaeus University, Stephen Hwang and Peter Aronsson respectively, as well as the Faculty of the Arts and Humanities at Linnaeus University; without their backing of IMS, this research would not have been possible. Also, we wish to thank both IMS and the University Library of Linnaeus University for generously funding a direct open-access version of our work. From Jørgen’s initiative, the Anthropocene cluster was constructed within IMS, a cluster that later changed its name to Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency (MEDEM) and now IMS: Green. We wish to thank all the members of IMS and all the members of MEDEM/IMS: Green in particular for their invaluable insights and discussions, which significantly illuminated ix

x

Acknowledgments

the development of the book project. Very special thanks go to Péter Kristóf Makai, whose critical reading of the book in its late stages provided an inestimable and productive (and often very critical!) commentary on all the chapters. In 2019, we developed the master’s course Intermedial Ecocriticism as part of the master’s program in English Language and Literature at Linnaeus University. We are much indebted to all the fabulously creative and insightful students we have had the opportunity to work with on the three occasions that the course has been offered. Many of the case studies in this monograph were scrutinized and developed in a dynamic dialogue with our students. Anna Ishchenko, a former student in this class and currently a PhD student in the Department of Languages at Linnaeus, has been an invaluable assistant in the editing process. In that sense, this book is both by and for these students, who will inherit the world we hand over to them, not to mention our children—we hope that this book, even if it does not change the world, will at least offer them some ideas about how to improve it. Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose

Introduction

We are living in times of crisis. Climate activists and scientists have warned us for decades about what we are now actually witnessing: record-breaking temperatures in Great Britain, dangerous wildfires in Spain, megadroughts in the west of the USA and in northern Italy, German rivers that are too dry for large boats to sail on them, and environmental migration on a large scale as a result of natural disasters in West and Central African regions. The climate crisis relates to and produces international crises, and the aftermath of COVID-19 as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022 have pushed food and energy prices to new levels, to the extent that the world appears to be on the brink of new and frightening emergencies. Underlying both the COVID pandemic and the question of energy management lie conflicts concerning human development versus maintaining natural refuge habitats, which critics have been predicting for a long time.1 The concept of the Anthropocene as a new, powerful metaphor for the epoch that planet Earth has entered is essentially about the fact that for millions of years, the Earth has been able to maintain some kind of subtle, sustainable structure between living organisms, geological formations, water, and air. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and later Bruno Latour, refer to this as the planetary, balanced system of Gaia: a beautiful, if also contested, planetary vision urging mankind to enter a new and less destructive relation to the planet.2 In the Anthropocene, this balance is being wrecked, with very frightening consequences for the natural environment, for human cultures, and for biotopes around the world. The effects of the Anthropocene create anxieties, destruction, and death. Alarming reports from the most reliable natural science institutions in the world have established that planet Earth is on a course toward a catastrophic future. Among the scientific models that demonstrate this are the 1

2

Introduction

multidisciplinary diagnoses offered by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (see figure 0.1), which as early as 2009 suggested taking a broad, systematic approach to environmental issues by setting up so-called safe or non-safe spaces for a limited number of essential planetary boundaries, including biodiversity, freshwater use, biochemical systems, and of course climate change.3 This model was supposed to be a scientifically solid and pedagogically well-explained way of providing useful overviews of the ecological state of the world—for scientists, but in particular for citizens and policymakers working in politics and business. The model has had an impact, but no dramatic changes for the better have occurred. The same can be said of UNbased scientific organizations, in particular the Intergovernmental Panel on

Figure 0.1  The planetary boundaries framework devised by the Stockholm Resilience Centre offers nine planetary boundaries “within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.” Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre Website, J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. 2015. https://www​.stockholmresilience​ .org​/research​/planetary​-boundaries​.html.

Introduction

3

Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): both agencies regularly publish reports that unequivocally demonstrate the dire situation, give clear indications about what needs to be done, and criticize governments and business leaders for not taking their messages seriously.4 The social sciences have different ways of understanding, investigating, confronting crises, ecological ones, and other types. They have vocabularies and methods that deal with the threats of social changes and the challenges to the development of economies and state formations under new, difficult conditions. One of the relevant social changes is the fact that climate change will contribute to the production of, and is already producing, large streams of migrants who are trying to travel from unsecure or deadly zones in the Global South to regions that they presume are safer in their neighboring countries or to the Global North (see figure 0.2).5 So, in this slightly exaggerated overall scientific division of labor, the natural sciences, traditionally, have taken it upon themselves to deliver the objective data (and to try not to appear too “alarmist” or too subjective), whereas the social sciences have described—and warned about—the societal consequences of eco-related natural scientific results. But what is the role of the humanities? We are trained in cultural studies, comparative literature and critical theory, and media studies, and we have asked ourselves how we can confront the climate situation. This book is a direct result of our broodings on this matter. So that we can initially frame our own position, let us briefly compare our approach to that set out in an excellent new introduction to the environmental humanities that displays typical features of the field. In the 2022 textbook, Introduction to the Environmental Humanities, the authors, J. Andrew Hubbell and John C. Ryan, begin by sketching the history and theory of the field, and they introduce a few overarching themes (climate change, the Anthropocene, and the question of indigenous cultures).6 After that, they list disciplinary approaches; they begin with chapters titled “Environmental Anthropology, Cultural Geography, and the Geohumanities: Space and Place” and “Environmental History,” then move on to philosophy, religious studies, environmental art, ecological literary studies, environmental theater, and environmental film, and end with a chapter entitled “Environmental Journalism.” From our point of view, though, this (admittedly broad) list of approaches used in the environmental humanities nevertheless lacks an overall perspective on the subjects that are discussed: the roles of media and mediation. A central argument of our book is that an engagement with media or mediation is an important, even crucial, component of future environmental humanities studies. Our standpoint can be evidenced through an informative and interesting chapter in Hubbell and Ryan’s book, “Environmental Journalism:

4

Introduction

Figure 0.2  The Global North and Global South, as suggested by the Royal Geographical Society. Source: “A 60-second guide to the Global North/South Divide”, Royal Geographical Society, www​.rgs​.org​/schools; https://www​.rgs​.org​/schools​/teaching​ -resources​/60​-second​-guide​-to​-global​-north​-south​-divide/.

Mediating Ecological Issues.” The title of the chapter seems to promise some reflections on the issue of mediation, but here, as elsewhere in the book, media are not defined but seem to be treated as roughly synonymous with digital media, social media, and mass media. The chapter mentions “the broader scholarly umbrella of environmental communication – defined as any communication activity that engages ecological contexts and concerns,” and explicitly states that most questions in eco-communication studies have to do with “transmission.”7 This is potentially a very important insight, because it implies a reflection on the mediated nature of all communication (see also our

Introduction

5

mention of science communication below), and Hubbell and Ryan briefly discuss what distinguishes journalism from literary writing.8 However, because there is no working concept of media or mediation, this discussion becomes unfocused. Hubbell and Ryan, by insisting both on the broad notion of “environmental communication” and on the insight that adult North Americans (as do most other citizens around the world) learn about ecology-related issues from news and documentaries (we would add literature, science reports, graphic novels, and films—see below), have laid the foundation for an overarching approach, but choose not to pursue it.9 In Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis through Art and Media, we make the similar argument that nonspecialist citizens do indeed learn about the climate crisis through different media types, and we also work with a broad notion of “environmental communication.” But we approach these facts from a media theoretical position, more specifically from an intermedial position. We call our approach intermedial ecocriticism. In opposition to conventional environmental humanities approaches, intermedial ecocriticism as a theory and method aims to describe, analyze, and compare very different examples of environmental communication. In other words, intermedial ecocriticism can work with disparate and diverse texts (in our terminology, media products) from different areas, which means, in practical terms, that intermedial ecocriticism challenges the often strict categorizations that are used in different approaches. We discuss similar topics to those considered by Hubbell and Ryan, including a novel, a journalistic documentary, a scientific article, and other media products that reflect the ecological crisis in general and the climate crisis more specifically, but we try to do it from a clearly defined theoretical basis.

INTERMEDIAL ECOCRITICISM AND THE RELATION TO “SCIENCE” The relations between the natural sciences and the humanities have often been tense: dominant theories of modern cultural theory, in particular different versions of poststructuralist thinking that include postcolonialism or feminism, have tended to consider the natural sciences as having an unreflective and uncritical relation to their own knowledge production and, in particular, to the results of this knowledge production.10 Science has regularly been accused of being part and parcel of oppressive, often Western and Enlightenment, hegemonic societal structures. Some versions of the environmental humanities, in particular fields interested in aesthetic media types, such as ecocriticism, have

6

Introduction

therefore had a very skeptical approach to natural science in general. Marxist and related left-wing theorizing, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, have had the same conflicting views. In recent years, these have developed into an infected discussion on the question of science and how to define nature. One of the most influential voices in this debate, Donna Haraway, has clarified that she strongly opposes the dreams of “technofixes,” the idea that sciences or technology “will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but clever children, or what amounts to the same thing, God will come to the rescue of his disobedient but ever hopeful children.”11 Hubbell and Ryan, who take a relatively conventional view of natural sciences, define them as “an empirical, evidence-based consensus process that ensures its theories are not just articles of faith or subjective impressions, but verifiable and correctable.”12 They argue that natural sciences, through their use of “[a]dvanced math, computing, communication, and technologies for observing and measuring phenomena beyond the capacities of unaided human senses,” have granted science a global status as the understanding of nature.13 They stress that even if such a definition might imply that science is the only sound way to approach natural reality, that would be a faulty conclusion: “traditional environmental knowledge” (TEK) offers essential insights not only into practices of agriculture or hunting but also into questions regarding the worth of nature and the possible aesthetic or ethical aspects of interacting with the natural world that the sciences would normally refrain from discussing. Another important discussion regarding the sciences has to do with the assumedly constructed nature of scientific results and the question of how truthful and/or reliable the scientific access to (knowledge about) nature is. In The Progress of the Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, ecosocialist environmental historian Andreas Malm attacks all of the theoretical approaches used in environmental humanities and eco-thinking that either relativize the truth claims of scientific knowledge or stress the constructed nature of scientific knowledge.14 One of his main opponents is Latour (but Haraway and other so-called “constructivists” or “hybridists,” who are skeptical about unmediated data (see below), are also the targets of his critique). Malm calls his position “critical realism,” referring to Kate Soper and her definition of nature. Nature, for Soper (and Malm), is those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not created by humans), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.15

Introduction

7

The obvious advantage of such a view of science is that scientific results about nature (as strictly divided from cultural or human aspects) can be seen as certain, trustworthy, and unambiguous. Consequently, this kind of science will work as direct, forceful advice for policymakers and politicians, or indeed as environmental advice for activists (who have Malm’s sympathy). We argue that the problem with the argument is that such a view of the scientific understanding and description of nature simplifies both the interrelatedness of the nature-culture relation and the role of mediating factors when human beings describe or research our surrounding environments. Gregg Garrard, a literary ecocritical scholar, describes the challenge for the environmental humanities as “de-idealizing without delegitimizing science,”16 and Hubert Zapf, another central figure in the environmental humanities, noted recently that a shift to more friendly relations seems to have taken place in the environmental humanities’ discourses regarding the “hard” sciences. In recent years, Zapf finds, science has been reaffirmed in environmental cultural studies in the 21st century in the context of climate change debates, in which the denial of global warming became a highly politicized form of postfactual discourse that could only be countered by a however critical and provisional acknowledgement of fact-based environmental science. One conclusion from this is that truth is not just a social construction, even if science and technology studies (STS) show that it is intricately entwined with specific historical-social conditions.17 Rather, the open-ended search for truth that includes correcting one’s assumptions in the face of new evidence remains a valid basis of any responsible project of scientific knowledge.18

One of the underlying ideas of our book is to regard the activities of science from a media theoretical perspective and from a broad media holistic perspective.19 One such media perspective concerns the way in which the natural scientific process consists in collecting, archiving, analyzing, and evaluating data. Such data are analyzed using computer simulations, which are now ubiquitous and have been made possible since the massive breakthrough of strong supercomputers.20 They enable scientists to produce and analyze extremely complex data sets. These data sets are representations of aspects of the outer world and not only present outer worlds but also in relation to past worlds, and in the case of threats, the data are used to simulate and predict future scenarios through various media. Simultaneously, and integrated into this, processes of internal and external mediations and media transformations and disseminations take place. The natural sciences, like all sciences, work in confined spaces and networks where experts communicate with each other by using highly specialized terminologies. The scientists develop theories and

8

Introduction

methods, publish results in highly specialized academic journals, or communicate results via papers and keynote lectures at conferences. In contrast to the “critical realist” perspective on science that Malm stresses, we wish to underline the fact that the gathering, evaluation, and reworking of data is a complex process that from the very outset has aspects of mediation to it. This has been discussed and described via anthropological methods in science and technology studies (STS).21 This approach to science has obvious interrelations with a media perspective: the production of knowledge, both in the initial phases before public dissemination in and outside academic circles and in complex and numerous translations, occurs between different media forms: collected data are immediately turned into parts of arguments and calibrations. After all these complex translations, rewritings, and reframings (which we, from an intermedial perspective, will call media transformations), the data will, mutatis mutandis, be an integral part of scientific articles, abstracts for future conferences, or verbal conference presentations. We only have access to the data after they have been translated or transformed via some kind of media; this is why “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron, to quote the title of Lisa Gitelman’s 2013 anthology.22 In intermedial terms, we would say that scientific data are, according to their very definition, the results of a media transformation. And from a media ecological perspective, “scientific results,” as logically integrated parts of scientific media products, must survive and thrive in new media environments, in anything from internet-based social media to TV to computer games, news items, literature, art, or popular science. In addition, the data, which is turned into scientific ideas and expressed in general media types and specific media products, are also transferred to, and need to survive in, pedagogical material in the educational sector. Scientific material is also part of nonprofit, public, and commercial campaigns, where there is the constant risk—just like in all media transformations—that the often-complex scientific materials are changed (simplified, redirected toward political goals, etc.) to such an extent that the originating ideas are more or less lost, or changed into something that is too far away from the source.23 The crucial lesson we want to draw from this is that the natural scientific production of knowledge is necessarily spread to all the sectors of society by way of media—and therefore the dominating majority of citizens, policymakers, business leaders, and everybody else outside the natural scientific circuits learn about the basic facts of the ecological climate crisis by way of media types and in media products that are transformations of the natural scientific sources.24 So (and this is pace Malm and Soper’s “critical realism”) the basic condition of knowledge is that the data from scientific investigations must be considered impure, or, rather, mediated. Media scholar Jan Baetens, in

Introduction

9

a review of Gitelman’s anthology “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron, puts it this way: Data is not something that is true or false in itself; the value of data is the value of the way it is being used. Neither is it something that has to be opposed to reading or interpretation: Data itself is always already a matter of reading and interpretation. And it is our common responsibility, not to long for “pure” (or “raw”) data, but to contribute as consciously and as dutifully as possible to the ongoing co-creation of data and interpretations.25

The starting point for our book is this simple insight, well-known in all areas of science communication: for natural scientific results to make any impact outside the relatively narrow circles of scientific publications and debate, the results need to be communicated. Communication per se involves media products with different possibilities and limits. Newspapers, popular science journals, and documentaries are some of the well-known media forms that communicate information about scientific research.26 But poetry, science fiction novels, feature films, and art exhibitions can do this too, which has been argued for regarding Rita Felski’s ideas about the Uses of Literature as well as in reception studies analyzing the effects of reading eco-related material (see our comments on empirically oriented studies in chapter 2).27 Scholars in several academic disciplines already know that scientific results need to be communicated to the public; such fields include risk communication studies, health communication studies, science communication studies, and climate change communication studies.28 These fields are based on a tradition of communication studies that are particularly well suited to analyzing the history and impact of journalistic media and mass medial forms, which have traditionally not been interested in aesthetic communication. A common denominator of many of these studies is how the communication is received and how it impacts consumers, which leads to an important question concerning ecological agency (in chapter 2, we will further discuss the concept of ecological agency). The notion of the impact of ecomedia is essential to this book, since one of the book’s main objectives in terms of its media comparative modus operandi is to illuminate how differently and satisfyingly different media types communicate the climate crisis. Our crucial, rather commonsensical starting point is that it is indeed media products that communicate basic ideas about the climate condition of the planet for most people; these different communications and mediations are crucial if any difference is going to be made to a world that is experiencing an ecological and climate emergency. As an inherent part of our project, we consider how ecological agency is also dependent on the specific potentials of different media types and products. A full understanding

10

Introduction

of how ecological agency operates can only be realized through a broad comparison of different ecomedia. But despite our extensive reading in the field, we have not yet come across a satisfactory theory or method that describes and analyzes (and thus compares) media products from the broad spectrum of products that communicate about the ecological crisis generally or the climate crisis, for instance, the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, science fiction feature films, newspaper articles, or board games, each of them representing different but comparable aspects of the crisis. It is our aim to suggest a theory and method that can do exactly this: compare different media products that represent the climate crisis. We call this approach intermedial ecocriticism. In chapter 1, we will sketch the history and terminology of the field of intermedial studies and intermediality to foreground the theoretical and methodological framework from which intermedial ecocriticism springs. Chapter 2 will discuss ecocriticism briefly and then be devoted to the construction of intermedial ecocriticism as a method of ecomedia analysis. We want to stress that our proposed method is but one way to organize an intermedial analysis of climate change and that there have been other approaches that examine intermedial and ecocritical perspectives. Chapters 3 to 6 contribute with case studies using intermedial ecocriticism as a method. The selection of case studies is based on relevant topics within the ongoing Anthropocene-related and ecological debates that are happening during the climate crisis, and the case studies conduct unusual comparisons between very diverse types of ecomedia. Finally, we draw some conclusions from our work and point toward how intermedial ecocriticism can be a productive contributor to understanding and approaching the climate crisis. We will conclude by presenting a few notes about the reasons why we chose this particular corpus for our case studies. Our first priority was to diversify the types of media referred to by including very different media to illustrate how different media types and media products communicate the climate crisis. For this comparison to function properly, it is advantageous to work with material that operates within a similar socioeconomic, cultural, and geopolitical context, in our case texts that emanate out of geographical spheres defined as the Global North, the Western world, or what Doyle adheres to as the “majority point.”29 We take this approach not to make any claims that the climate crisis is not a global affair, but only to state that the specific complexities of each geopolitical zone would necessitate a different and more extensive case study analysis of a mediated climate crisis. We hope that our intermedial ecocritical method will be used in different types of analyses that also include material and topics relevant to non-Western geopolitical areas or that compare medial affordances and topics between the Global North and Global South.

Introduction

11

A study of a mediated climate crisis in the North also has global bearings. Two of the media products we analyzed are from two global organizations that, at least superficially, are constituted of representations from a global scientific community: the IPCC report of the United Nations and the website on sustainable food, Eatforum​.or​g. In addition to this, it is important to acknowledge the distinction between the terms Global North and Global South and how they are categorized. The categorization and distinction between Global North and Global South are arbitrary and useful in many ways, rather than blunt instruments for analysis. As Doherty and Doyle suggest, there are also divisions between the elite of the Global South and the South of the Global North (706).30 To reflect this, two media products are from the Nordic countries and connote slightly different climate contexts than those present in other N ­ orthern regions: the advertisement film Dear Piece of Meat for the supermarket COOP and the novel Den afskyelige by Charlotte Weitze. By considering the two Nordic media products and discussing the French comic Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni, our corpus also partly challenges the typical and dominant exclusivity of Anglophone material. One final question to ask in this introduction is: What difference to our crisis-ridden world will one more volume discussing different kinds of representations of the ecological crisis make? We are well aware that a book like this one operates on an entirely different scale and context than some of the crucial organized activist responses that have emerged in recent years, such as those of the international movements Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future, more local initiatives like Bedsteforældrenes Klimaaktion i Danmark [Grandparents’ Climate Action in Denmark], and more alternative groups such as Fuck for Forest. There are also brave indigenous consciousnessraising efforts taking place in many locations in the Global South. Academic books seldom achieve the kind of activist goals that these movements aim for, but in academia, we put effort into creating concepts that make us understand the condition we are in; these efforts offer comparisons between different images of our world and the future world that will become ours and our children’s. The critical instrument we propose in this book perhaps allows us to navigate better in, and be better informed about, the ongoing info-wars that are being waged concerning the planetary state of affairs.

NOTES 1. Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020), 3. 2. Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2015); Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic

12

Introduction

Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998). The following texts are good entry points to the rich literature on this term: Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (London: Verso, 2016); Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Colin N. Waters et al., “A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene,” Geological Society of London 395, no. 1 (January 2014): 1–21, https://doi​.org​/10​.1144​/SP395. 3. Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 2009): 472–475, https://www​.nature​.com​/articles​/461472a. 4. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: IPCC Special Report On Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-industrial Levels in Context of Strengthening Response to Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty, ed. Valerie Masson-Delmotte et  al. (Cambridge University Press, 2018), https://www​ .ipcc​.ch​/sr15/; IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, ed. Eduardo S. Brondizio et al. (Bonn, 2019), https://doi​.org​/10​.5281​ /zenodo​.3831673. 5. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Annual Report 2021 (Geneva: OCHA, 2021), https://2021​.annualreport​.unocha​.org/. 6. Andrew J. Hubbell and John Ryan, Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). 7. Ibid., 232. 8. Ibid., 229. 9. Ibid., 230. They point out that journalism and news are crucial sources for the communication of eco-related content: “A study by the Pew Research Center, for instance, indicates that most American adults obtain information about current science-related issues – energy, biodiversity, climate, and food – from general news sources and documentaries.” 10. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 78. 11. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 3. 12. Hubbell and Ryan, “Introduction,” 133. 13. Ibid. 14. Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018). 15. Kate Soper quoted in Malm, The Progress, 28. 16. Gregg Garrard, “Understanding Climate Skepticism: Global Talking Points, Local Singularities,” quoted in Hubert Zapf, “Posthumanism or Ecohumanism? Environmental Studies in the Anthropocene,” Journal of Ecohumanism 1, no. 1 (January 2022): 18, https://doi​.org​/10​.33182​/joe​.v1i1​.1743. 17. Sheila Jasanoff et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, rev. ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001). 18. Zapf, “Posthumanism or Ecohumanism,” 6.

Introduction

13

19. As concretized by Steven Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubbit, Ecomedia: Key Issues (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 20. Aimee Kendall Roundtree, Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination: How Virtual Evidence Shapes Science in the Making and in the News (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Chad Wickman, “Locating the Semiotic Power of Writing in Science,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 29, no. 1 (2014): 61–92; Edoardo Mollona, “Computer Simulation in the Social Sciences,” Journal of Management and Governance 12 (2008): 205–211. 21. Among other things, the analysis of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); and for an introduction to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), see Sergio Sismondo, An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 22. Lisa Gitelman, ed., “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 23. This short overview of the delicate and dangerous roads through which “data” can become part of different communicative stratagems is not meant to be exhaustive in any sense: environmental communication studies or knowledge sociology are better suited to conducting these kinds of discussions. 24. Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Climate Change and the Dark Side of Translating Science into Popular Culture,” in The Dark Side of Translation, ed. Federico Italiano (New York: Routledge, 2020), 111–125. 25. Jan Baetens, Review of Raw Data is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman, Leonardo 47, no. 3 (2014): 304, muse​.jhu​.edu​/article​/54​6282. 26. As Hubbell and Ryan argue in “Introduction.” 27. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 28. For a recent literature review of some of these fields, see Amy E. Chadwick, “Climate Change Communication,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 29. Timothy Doyle, Environmental Movements in Majority and Minority Worlds (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 15. 30. Brian Doherty and Timothy Doyle, “Beyond Borders: Transnational Politics, Social Movements and Modern Environmentalisms,” Environmental Politics 15, no. 5 (2006): 706.

Chapter 1

Intermedial Studies

The climate crisis is media borne. This book stresses how the climate crisis in all its diversified forms is closely connected to how it is being expressed through the media. In chapter 2, we will develop a specific theory and method for investigating and comparing different types of ecomedia. Before that, in this chapter, we will introduce and provide the history of intermedial studies; we will also present the necessary definitions and terminology used within it, which together provide the theoretical and methodological framework for our ecocritical media analyses and our construction of intermedial ecocriticism. This chapter, therefore, will demonstrate how to describe, analyze, compare, and discuss a large number of communicative forms that exist across the conventional media and disciplinary borders, and these methods will then be utilized in the formation of intermedial ecocriticism in chapter 2 and beyond. INTERMEDIALITY: AN INTRODUCTION The term “intermediality” is becoming more and more popular and gaining an increasing influence, particularly in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, but also in Brazil, China, South Korea, and the UK. There is sometimes confusion about whether the term “intermediality” denotes an object of study, a method of study, or a theory about a category of objects. In what follows, however, we will be careful to distinguish between intermedial studies as the method and theory of study, and intermediality (of media products) as the object of study. Intermedial studies investigates the interaction between similarities and differences in media as well as the changes that occur in communicative material when content is transported from one media type to another. 15

16

Chapter 1

Intermedial studies, in the version of the field that we adhere to, was developed at the Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies under the direction of Lars Elleström. With Elleström, we argue that all communicative situations and all media types are multimodal; media types draw on different forms of resources for meaning-making. To take a basic example, when we speak to someone face-to-face, we not only understand the words they use but also draw on intonation, body language, speech rhythm, and the surrounding context to make sense of what we hear—without even thinking about it. This is true not just concerning face-to-face communication; when communication is conducted across temporal and spatial distances, for instance, when you study a scientific article or watch a movie, there is never only one form of meaning-making involved. When you are reading a text, either a printed version on paper or via a digital interface online, you are not only responding to the meaning of the written words: the layout and typography also provide you with various kinds of visual information that facilitate reading and help you follow the line of argumentation. If you are reading a printed text, you are, often without thinking about it, evaluating tactile and auditory information, and if you are reading an e-book, the physical information found in a printed book has to be replaced by visual indicators. Thus, as media scholar W. J. T. Mitchell has pointed out, all communication involves, if not all, then several of our senses.1 There are no purely visual, textual, or auditory media. All media products are, therefore, heterogeneous rather than “monomedial”: All media are mixed media is a sort of slogan of intermedial studies. Historically, intermedial research has been particularly interested in artistic media products and has focused on relations between texts and images, words and music, or on media transformations that in some way or other cross and challenge conventional artistic media borders. Attempts to find ways to allow readers to describe, analyze, and compare an even wider variety of different media products and nonaesthetic media types have been systematically described in Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media.2 The very broad use of media that we pursue in this book is also different from the classic intermedial approach, which focuses on artistic objects. We argue that it is essential to look beyond artistic media products to offer a method that can be applied to all forms of communication and analysis. So what is the point of intermedial analysis? We can read and understand a graphic novel consisting of words and images in complex graphic setups, and we can apprehend the relation between words and photographs in a scientific article without knowing anything about intermediality or intermedial studies. However, if we want to discuss, understand, and compare these intermedial relations, it is necessary to have an appropriate terminology and useful analytical tools.

Intermedial Studies

17

DEFINING MEDIA AND A HISTORY OF INTERMEDIALITY When we talk about “media” in everyday conversations, we are mostly referring to mass communication channels for news, sports, and entertainment. In our tradition of intermedial studies, “medium” stands for something much more comprehensive. Medium in Latin means “in between,” and one way of thinking about media is to see them as mediators, things that enable communication across time and space. Media are the material components of human communication. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan extended the definition of a medium to include “any extension of man.” Thus, the list of material objects that can function as a medium is probably endless, and it even involves physical phenomena like light or sound waves and our own bodies. Therefore, once we become interested in the material aspect of human communication, media turn out to be everywhere. Anything and everything can be used as a medium: white pebbles on a beach are not usually a medium, but the white stones that Hansel, in the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, drops as he goes into the woods, are definitely a media product, conveying a simple but important message: “We came this way.” The observations made in the preceding paragraph also mean that there is probably not much point in asking what a medium is (and what it is not); it is more productive to investigate the ways in which objects and phenomena can function as media products. How do material objects facilitate human communication? And how do the material aspects of a medium shape what is communicated? A well-constructed intermedial terminology that avoids some of the wellknown confusion that can be caused by using the tangle of terms that are used in media theory is a useful tool for understanding intermedial relations, so let us begin by very briefly introducing some of the major terms that will be explained later. We call the individual communicative entity a media product, and all media products belong to some kind of qualified media type. The qualified media type, which in many traditions is known as a genre, has to do with how a type of media is used and what cultural or ideological conventions define it (more on this later in this chapter). All media products consist of smaller building blocks (like written text, images, rhythmic sound, and several others), which we call the basic media, and all media, because they are media, have a material carrier aspect, which we call the technical devices of display. To illustrate this, let’s take the example of Silent Spring, the classic 1962 ecocritical text written by Rachel Carson. We can read this media product using different technical devices of display, for instance, a printed book or a sound file audiobook, or we can read a digital version on a tablet.

18

Chapter 1

The qualified media type of Silent Spring would be popular science writing, or perhaps an ecocritical essay, and if we read the printed book, the basic media used in Silent Spring is written text and illustrations. Following on from this terminological blitz, we can begin the introduction to the field of intermedial studies. Although intermedial studies is a recent research discipline, intermediality as a phenomenon (defined as the interaction within and between different media types) has always existed because all media are internally multimodal and externally interrelated with each other. However, whether intermedial and multimodal aspects are acknowledged and encouraged or are criticized and suppressed depends on the historical context, because mediated communication is always formed by ideas, ideologies, and conventions. In Ancient Greek, for example, the word mousike refers both to what we would call poetry and to what we would call music (song) today. In the centuries that followed the Ancient Greek period, these have been increasingly conceptualized as different qualified media types. When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, the decision was difficult to accept for those who insisted on a conventional border between literature and music. To others, the same decision highlighted the idea that poetry could, or even should, be performed. One way of looking at the historical discussions about intermedial aspects of Western art, which have repercussions for the general field of communication, is to track the ideals of homogeneous art forms as opposed to heterogeneous art forms. Discussions about this can be traced far back in the European history of aesthetics, albeit with important ideological undertones. From an intermedial perspective, we can see how these discussions and concepts about the relation between different art forms include an awareness of what we call mediality—that is, how art forms, like all forms of human communication, are shaped by the material that we perceive and make sense of. Five fundamental concepts, which have repercussions to this day, have played a large role in these historical discussions: paragone, ut pictura poesis, Gesamtkunstwerk (meaning “total work of art”), medium specificity, and transmediality.3 The idea of paragone (Italian for “comparison”) originates in Renaissance art theory and relates to a ranking competition among the arts—each form vying to be deemed the best and the most valuable. Famously, Leonardo da Vinci argued that painting was the highest example of artistic form. This was refuted by, among others, the sculptor, painter, and architect Michelangelo, who counter-argued for the primacy of sculpture. The paragone debate has been an ongoing, if not always very fruitful, discussion in Western cultural history. In 2010, a German collection of essays, inspired by intermedial studies, reinvigorated the idea of the “comparative competition” between media types by analyzing not only classical art forms but also TV, advertising,

Intermedial Studies

19

graphic novels, and computer games in a framework inspired by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.4 The essays demonstrate that it is possible to see current competition among modern qualified media as a contemporary paragone debate, for example, seeing film as more “artistic” than “popular” television, or perhaps believing that the visualization of scientific facts is more efficient and reliable than more textual representations of science. Ideas regarding the interrelations between media types have shifted between those that point out the benefits of the merging of art forms and those that warn against such merging. Different terms have been used in different periods, beginning with the Roman writer Horace’s (65 BC – 8 AC) idea of ut pictura poesis (“as in painting, so in poetry”), which means that what can be accomplished and admired in painting can be accomplished and admired in literature too. This was refuted centuries later in the influential essay of the German Enlightenment writer G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) called Laocoon: On the Limits of Painting and Poetry.5 Lessing’s text offers an interesting discussion of fundamental intermedial insights, namely that the same event must be represented differently in different media. However, one does not necessarily have to come to Lessing’s normative conclusion, namely that literature should deal with and represent time and narrative subjects, whereas painting should stick to a spatial, or nontemporal, presentation, for instance, of the landscape. Lessing’s treatise has inspired numerous positions that have circled around the idea of medium specificity to the time of writing, seeing the concept as involving either descriptive formats or sometimes normative dogma, across the fields of literature, painting, and film. Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) late Romantic concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, is one of the elaborated versions of the ut pictura tradition.6 The immersive practices of the modern cinema experience are exponents of this idea—the darkened movie theater, with high-quality visual representations and impressive sound systems, very much imitates the innovative ideas of Wagner, who wanted to overwhelm his spectators with the combined powers of orchestral music, performances, poetry, and stage props. Views that oppose this concept include numerous attempts to specify the different art forms (or media types) and others that aim to limit them to their own formal investigation. A clear example of the medium specificity position is the American art critic Clement Greenberg’s extended engagement with modernist art in the second half of the twentieth century. The influential idea of medium specificity describes the possibilities and limitations of different media types, and is often, in a simplified manner, seen as synonymous with the idea of affordances. It is important to understand that affordances are not objective characteristics of a media product; rather, in the “strong” sense of the term (originating in visual perception studies7), affordances are aspects of objects or environments (and, consequently, media) that afford specific uses.

20

Chapter 1

This means that some of the possible uses will indeed be activated, whereas others will remain latent, that is, not actualized. This understanding of media affordance fits very well with a Peircean understanding of semiosis, where signs are things that must be activated and used in order to be meaningful in any way—to work as signifying instruments.8 The more restricted concept of medium specificity dates back to Lessing, and the debate resurfaces from time to time in discussions among both artists and critics, often when new media types are battling to find stable ground.9 Medium specificity has to do with creating or upholding borders between media; transmediality, on the other hand, denotes the possibilities of transgressing the borders between different media.10 Transmediality, according to the definition suggested by Elleström, has to do with the fact that you can, for example, express the theme of “joy” by way of different media types: a scientific article, a poem, or a rock ballad.11 Even some structural forms are transmedial, such as narrativity and rhythm, which are not specific to literature, film or oral storytelling, but exist in many verbal and nonverbal media types. Narrativity is an important aspect of older traditions of painting, for example, but is less significant in sculpture. Elleström argues that newspaper articles and popular scientific articles almost always have a narrative structure, and must contain a mathematical equation.12 The same goes for rhythm. The relation between medium specificity and transmediality is a very important theme in intermedial studies, and it lies at the center of all analysis of media transformation, which we consider to be crucial in discussions of representations of the environmental crisis.

MEDIA ASPECTS If we want to address a wide set of intermedial material and intermedial representations of the ecological and climate crisis, we need a broad, general framework that explains how all sorts of media work on several levels at the same time. In the following section, we will describe the specific intermedial terminology we use to analyze and understand intermedial relations. In our everyday use of media, we oftentimes concentrate on content and tend to ignore the complex interaction of material, sensorial, and semiotic processes that not only facilitates but also shapes this content. Generally, we only become aware of mediation when a technical device does not work properly or when it is unfamiliar to us, when we cannot, for some reason or other, use all our senses, or when the media product explicitly draws attention to its own mediation. The broad variety of intermedial relations has often been approached by identifying and defining specific and different forms. Such typologies provide

Intermedial Studies

21

a good overview and may be a first step in approaching a new field.13 However, if everything can be used as media, how can the typology provide an encompassing overview? And how can we find terminology for the endless variety of intermedial relations? Although typologies and categorizations are built to identify differences, intermedial phenomena are an interplay between differences made possible by similarities. Thus, a focus on sorting and categorizing by means of perceptible differences proves to be a difficult method of analysis. There is no lack of broad concepts of media that stress the ubiquity of mediation in our everyday life and how media concern societal questions,14 but fewer theories offer terminologies that can be used for analysis. While we agree with W. J. T. Mitchell that all media are mixed media, we want to go one step further to deal with this heterogeneity in a specific intermedial analysis. As already mentioned, we find that Elleström’s terminology is very helpful in this regard.15 Elleström tackles the variety and complexity of intermedial relations by focusing on the fundamental characteristics that all media share. In order to analyze intermedial relations, you first need to know what all media have in common. This kind of bottom-up approach provides a flexible framework that addresses how mediation always takes place on different levels and how “intermediality must be understood as a bridge between media differences that is founded on media similarities.”16 Elleström cross-links the overlapping frameworks of intermedial and multimodal studies and draws on different traditions that study the mixedness of media and communication by stressing that mediation always involves different aspects and takes place on different levels simultaneously. Thus, with this approach, it becomes possible not only to agree with Mitchell that all media are (modally) mixed but also to analyze the mixedness of media and how material characteristics, different semiotic processes, and their conventions interact in shaping the very communication they facilitate. We tend to answer the question of what a medium is differently and confusingly because we often answer the question depending on which aspect of mediation we are focusing on. Regarding “radio,” for instance, we might refer to a technical device (a radio) that receives a particular kind of airwaves at a specific frequency that are used to transmit sounds, but “radio” can also refer to a broadcasting company, for example, the BBC. “Radio” can even designate a specific kind of sound-based content that a broadcasting company produces and transmits (to its audience’s radios), including particular genres like radio news, as distinct from newspaper or television news, or radio plays. We might also refer to a smartphone application that distributes the content of broadcasting companies (that was previously distributed by radio waves) in the form of digital files. In fact, when we talk about media such as radio, popular science, or film/cinema, we often do so by referring to certain

22

Chapter 1

materials, but we actually think of them as specific forms of communication that are shaped by cultural conventions. This tendency to mix up the material form with the communicative form they facilitate is not a huge problem in everyday life and is often not a problem at all, as long as it only happens in specific disciplinary contexts. However, it becomes problematic when we start to compare different media types, and therefore we need to be more specific concerning which aspect we are thinking of, and this is where it is important to grasp the three dimensions of all media briefly introduced earlier. Are we speaking about objects such as books or records? Or are we speaking about what they give access to, that is, configurations such as text, images, or organized sound? Or perhaps we are referring to the kind of information or meaning that we make sense of according to the convention of a specific context? We therefore need to clarify different aspects of media and to be more precise than in everyday speech. That is why we follow Elleström’s model and differentiate between the three different dimensions of media: the technical devices of display, basic media types (the “building blocks”), and qualified media types. This allows us to address the physical, perceptual, and cognitive aspects of individual media products and to understand how they enable social interaction. These categories are not to be thought of as different groups of media; they are aspects that are part of and relevant in all forms of mediation, so let’s look at them in more detail.

TECHNICAL DEVICES OF DISPLAY, BASIC MEDIA TYPES, AND QUALIFIED MEDIA TYPES Technical devices of display are the material bases of mediation: they provide access to the media products. Technical devices of display could be clay, paper, or stone, or the screens and loudspeakers used in electronic communication. Technical devices of display are a function of physical objects that sometimes also serve as storage (such as books—as opposed to loudspeakers, which only produce and thus display the sound); these objects can also interact with different production tools (such as pens, typewriters, keyboards, cameras, and microphones), storage devices (such as records), or dissemination devices (such as record players and projectors). Their material qualities and functions shape what can be communicated. Sheets of paper provide access to several basic media types, such as text and images. Such texts and images can be arranged in different ways so that we recognize them as different qualified media types, for instance poems, scientific articles, or graphic novels. The smartphone and computer provide access to innumerable media products and qualified media types. In face-to-face communication, performing arts, and music, the presence of the human body functions as a technical device of display.17

Intermedial Studies

23

It is important to keep in mind that everything in a given context can be perceived as technical devices of display. Stones in a forest, glasses, and a table in a kitchen are not always perceived as technical devices of display, but they can acquire that function on a forest path (in a fairy tale) or in interaction with actors’ bodies on a stage (in a theatrical play). While technical devices of display are needed to realize media products, they are not in focus in our interaction with media products as long as they are familiar and function well. We perceive and manipulate them, but our attention is not usually focused on these actions—it is on what they display. We tend to “look through” the technical devices of display as long as communication is functioning. When we are manipulating technical devices of display, our attention is focused on certain configurations of sign systems: text or speech, images, organized sound, moving images, or gestures. All these basic media types can, in a multimodal analysis, be differentiated as constituting numerous different semiotic modes. These basic media types are not the smallest entities that can provide meaningful information, but they are basic, meaning that they are used and combined in many different kinds of media products. That is why we refer to them as the building blocks of qualified media types. Obviously, the same basic media types can be combined very differently, such as the texts and images in children’s books, illustrated novels, comics, advertisements, internet memes, and news articles. Certain technical devices of display are particularly well suited to providing access to certain basic media types. Paper or screens are well suited for texts or images but less suited to displaying a basic media type such as organized sound or speech. And while sound waves work perfectly well for basic media types like the organized sound of music and speech, sound waves cannot easily display gestures and facial expressions; these are basic media types of body language that use human bodies as technical devices of display. We do not automatically understand all kinds of texts, images, organized sounds, gestures, etc. Depending on the historical and social context, these basic media types are used and integrated differently and are involved in different forms of meaning making. This is the qualified media type. Text is used differently in a novel, a poem, a news article, and an SMS text message, and we look differently at images as art paintings, children’s paintings, or caricatures. Consequently, we recognize particular qualified media types by the way basic media types are arranged, and we have different expectations of them. Media products can be qualified in more or less detail, depending on which other kinds of media products they are compared with. General categories such as literature, scientific reports, visual art, and documentary films can, if needed, be qualified even more specifically into different genres (or submedia), according to the conventions and the context. Novels, short stories, poems, and essays are examples of qualified submedia of literature.

24

Chapter 1

The differences we perceive between different qualified media products are confirmed, challenged, or extended with every new media product we interact with. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel Watchmen (1986–87), for example, challenges the idea that comics cannot tell narratives that are as complex as those in text-based novels, and Philippe Squarzoni’s graphic novel Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science (2014— discussed in Chapter 4) definitely offers a better introduction to climate science than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) own summary reports. As the term qualified media type indicates, the traits of qualified media types have to do with contexts and uses, that is, how different media are qualified by audiences and users, both positively and negatively. The three aspects of media (technical devices of display, basic media, and qualified media) are all present in each media product. The technical devices of display give us access to the basic media types that we understand according to the contexts and conventions of qualified media, and all qualified media types consist of basic media. THE FOUR MODALITIES OF MEDIA The three aspects of media are useful for describing the complex setup of each media product. However, we need to take one more step to another level that can help us understand the workings of media products. This next level is called the modalities of media. We interact simultaneously with every media product on different level. We engage with the material object, which we perceive with our senses, and the object’s different spatial and temporal characteristics interact with each other. Furthermore, we understand that what we perceive with our senses is representing something else as a sign. These descriptions refer to, respectively, the material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic modalities of media, according to Elleström. An awareness of the media modalities helps us to understand what we are actually doing when we communicate and interact with media products: we are interacting with different material objects, we are giving these objects sensorial attention, and we are perceiving signs. THE MATERIAL MODALITY When we focus on the material modality, we ask how and why these material objects function as an interface of communication. A page in a book and a screen of an electronic device are different technical devices of display, but they are both flat surfaces and thus offer a suitable interface for basic media

Intermedial Studies

25

types such as texts or images. Records and the speech organs of the human body are different technical devices of display, but they both produce sound waves and thus offer a suitable interface for basic media types such as speech or the organized sound of music. When we engage with media, we treat them in a way that depends on what kind of interface we consider important. Very different material objects such as stones, plasma screens, and paper are perceived as interchangeable when we read texts or look at images because we primarily focus only on the two dimensions of three-dimensional objects and neglect the material quality of the object that provides the surface. When we look at sculptures or engage with architecture, all three dimensions as well as the material quality of the objects are perceived as potentially meaningful. In the material modality, we can thus perceive similarities between materially very different devices as long as they provide the same interface. We can also perceive differences in communicative situations that use the same interface.

THE SENSORIAL MODALITY Regarding the sensorial modality, we are interested in our sensual perception of the material interface that the media product demands of us. Media exist not only materially, as physical objects; they also reach us through our five external sense organs (and via our so-called internal senses of balance, etc.). In order to “meet” the sensorial modalities of media, we must be able to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste something. Ultrasonic sounds, for example, although materially present and perceptible to bats and to scientific measuring tools, are unsuitable as a basic media type in human communication simply because human beings cannot perceive them with their sensorial apparatus. The importance of the sensorial modality can be experienced when sense organs are temporarily or permanently limited. Many intersensorial translations are possible, but they all radically affect communication and, consequently, the semiotic modality. We sense a particular aspect through one or more internal and external sense organs, and then we perceive and process the sensation or sensations in both our brain and our body. Experiencing perception through our brain is called cognitive perception, and meaning-making through our body is called embodiment. These processes are deeply interrelated in the sense that embodiment, although at times unconscious, affects cognitive perception and vice versa. Feelings that are noncognitive, embodied, or those with a low level of cognition are usually considered affects (not triggered by a direct source), whereas more cognitive categorizations of sensorial impulses are framed as emotions (an effect of an explicit source). These interactions are studied in theories of emotion and sensorial aesthetics, and affect theory, for

26

Chapter 1

example, a theory might explain how senses, emotions, and embodiments add to communicative acts.18 As you will see in this book, these interactions are important when we are comparing the impact of different media products, especially when we are dealing with the concept of ecological agency. Research has shown that sense organs do not operate in isolation from each other: vibrations can be heard and felt, our taste is connected to smell, and multimodal studies show how different kinds of perceptions combine, support, and fortify each other.19 Although we use all our senses when engaging with media products, we usually only focus on some of them regarding what we perceive when we interact with them. We hear the rustle of the pages of a book, feel the weight of the book in our hands, and perceive the smell of a new (or old and dusty) book, yet we focus on vision while perceiving the text on the pages. Media products exploit our capacity for cross-modal translations. In the sensorial modality, we construct complex neurological connections between our memories and our sensorial input, which Elleström calls cross-modal iconicity.20 When we watch the image of ringing bells, it makes us “hear” the bells. When we read about a flower, we can “sense” its smell.21 THE SPATIOTEMPORAL MODALITY The spatiotemporal modality deals with the obvious but also complex fact that we perceive all objects, including all media products, in space and time. Time and space are always related, even if we only focus on one of them. If we look at a huge tree, we perceive it as a spatial object, but we might call it an old tree as well, because we realize that its enormous size is the result of a long temporal process. In the same way, but often in very sophisticated forms, we perceive all media products in space and in time. However, media products as such have different spatiotemporal qualities. We classify some media types, such as images, as primarily spatial objects. We can usually describe the spatial dimensions of these objects in terms of depth, height, and length. Although time is involved in producing and perceiving the objects, for instance, an oil on canvas, we would not describe it temporally as “three months’ work of painting” or “three minutes of watching time.” The spatiotemporal qualities of media are important for several reasons. They offer a needed focus on less-considered aspects, for instance, the temporal dimensions of spatial objects and the spatial qualities of temporal events. This means that although images are spatial objects in the material modality, we always need time to look at them by way of the sensorial modality, and a verbal text can create virtual time by very basic means. In addition, although text as a basic media type is as stable as images on the page in the material

Intermedial Studies

27

modality, we engage with text differently as we read one word after another in terms of an ordered sequentiality. We perceive the text of an IPCC report as a temporal event. The sensorial time of reading and the virtual time of the represented material interact in different ways. The temporal succession of words on a page in a novel communicates the virtual space of a story world as well. Not all of these spatiotemporal characteristics are essential in every intermedial analysis. However, it is important to keep in mind that intermedial relations tend to exploit the spatial and temporal characteristics of a media product and that they draw on different ways of how space represents time and vice versa.

THE SEMIOTIC MODALITY Finally, it is important to stress that the reason why we engage with media is not their inherent material, sensorial, and spatiotemporal qualities. It is obvious that these modalities also communicate with us, on an aesthetic level, via affect and embodiment and through channels that require a low level of cognitive engagement or even through subconscious channels. Nevertheless, a lot of “meaning” is created cognitively: we engage with media products because they mean something. The material, sensorial, and spatiotemporal qualities of media products provide information that we understand as representing something else. Thus, media products employ our ability to make meaning of signs, and this occurs in the semiotic modality. Media can rely on conventional sign systems, such as languages, but also, for instance, a sign system that is difficult to translate into words, such as bodily movements in dance. There are different ways to understand how signs work. Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) linguistic theory and his concept of the two-sided linguistic sign have had a major impact on the development of linguistics and semiotics since the early twentieth century. It is now, however, broadly acknowledged that his language-based model creates difficulties when we want to compare the relations between different kinds of media and, for example, when we want to understand how language communicates in relation to, and combined with, images, sounds, and other forms of basic media. The Växjö School of Intermedial Studies draws on the work of the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Peirce differentiates three ways in which we make signs that relate to what a sign is supposed to signify: signs can be based on similarity (icons), contiguity (indices),22 or convention and habits (symbols). We connect the iconic signs to an object in the same way that pictures relate to their objects, namely due to their similarity.

28

Chapter 1

Indexical signs—symptoms, or traces—rely on contiguity to relate to the objects they signify: they signify that a certain object is or has been present. Symbolic signs, for instance, words, form a relation that is based on habit and convention. Peirce’s theory makes us aware that signs are arbitrary and meaningless until an interpreter attributes significance to them. Returning to the example we used earlier about the white stones that Hansel dropped, we may or may not notice a white stone on the ground on a hiking tour, but to Hansel and Gretel trying to find their way home, each stone is an indexical sign because they relate it to the act of having dropped it there. But that does not mean that all white stones have the conventional meaning, “we came this way.” It is important to clarify that the three kinds of relations—iconical, indexical, and symbolical—are present in all kinds of signs, even if one of them is more prominent. Words are not only conventional symbols; they also form iconic and indexical relations to the objects they signify. Many words relate iconically to the objects they refer to; we can hear the similarity in onomatopoetic words that refer to sounds, for instance “crackle,” “hush,” and “whisper.” When we look at a photograph, we consider the iconic relation it forms with the objects shown in it, but we also consider a photograph to be an indexical sign that something was present at a certain time and place. Intermedial relations often exploit this ambiguity of signs, that is, the possibility of relating in multiple ways to different objects. By using the four modalities, we can systematically compare and differentiate between what happens in different forms of mediation and intermedial relations. The modalities draw our attention to the fact that we carry out different acts when engaging with media products. We interact with objects; we perceive information with all our senses; we pay attention to certain temporal and spatial relations on material, sensorial, and semiotic levels; and finally, we understand the sense data as certain form of signs.

HETEROMEDIAL COMBINATION AND TRANSMEDIALITY We have now described how technical devices of display relate to basic and qualified media types, introduced the four media modalities, and briefly mentioned how the functions of different media types are qualified by historical and social contexts. These aspects are extremely helpful, in particular in relation to what we call step 1 of our intermedial ecocritical analytical process (see chapter 2 for more detail). However, the very descriptive dimension of specific media products needs to be complemented with the complex questions that occur when content and form are not only affected by the

Intermedial Studies

29

combining of different media types (and the basic media that are part of all media) but are also affected when they are integrating with other media types or when content is transformed from one media type to another. The same media product can always be approached from different perspectives. A synchronic perspective explores the interaction between different basic or qualified media types—we call this the heteromedial perspective. We can even explore the diachronic aspect—we call this the perspective of transmediality, which consists of the transfer of ideas or narratives across media (transmediation) or the media representation of one media type or product in another.23 THE SYNCHRONIC HETEROMEDIAL PERSPECTIVE Discussing the heteromedial aspects means analyzing the combination and integration of media and modality aspects in specific media products: these do not refer to two different sorts of media products but rather express a different analytical focus.24 To the audience of a live-action film, for instance, the moving images, sound effects, music, and speech can be analytically divided into basic media but are experienced as a unity because they are deeply integrated into the sensorial modality. When we approach media combinations by applying the four modalities, we can see how the material and sensorial integration of basic qualified media types enables the formation of intricate combinations of different forms of meaning-making that support and interact with each other. Another option is to explore the combination and integration of different modalities of a particular media product. Different basic media types can share the same material interface, for instance, pages and screens when we think of the combination of texts and images, or sound waves when we think of the lyrics and melody in a pop song. Other qualified media types combine different material interfaces, such as screens and loudspeakers in film, which provide an integrated audiovisual experience. In the heteromedial dimension, intermedial and multimodal approaches overlap. An intermedial analysis provides the tools to analyze the synchronic integration not only between but also within basic media types, such as texts, images, and organized sound, and involves an even more fine-grained analysis, understanding, for instance, how the typography, color, and layout of a text are part of the meaning making of, for example, a scientific article. TRANSMEDIALITY AND MEDIA TRANSFORMATION The broad term media transformation refers to all kinds of processes in which the form or content of one media type is reconstructed and thus transformed

30

Chapter 1

by another media type, for instance, a certain narrative (the plot of a novel), or a set of ideas (say, the hypothesis of a scientific paradigm as expressed in a scientific article), or the visual aesthetics of an oil painting that is reused in a commercial ad. As opposed to the analysis of the synchronic heteromedial aspect of mixedness, transmediality has to do with a temporal, diachronic perspective. “Having a diachronic perspective,” Elleström says, “means considering how media features appear in relation to preceding and possibly subsequent media.”25 Transmediality relies on two interrelated aspects: transmediation and media representation. Transmediation reconstitutes meaning that was previously mediated by another media type: a film adaptation, for example, can mediate the same story as a novel. When we analyze transmediations, we focus on the diachronic process that involves a source media product and a target media product and analyze what is transferred and what is transformed. We often speak of transmediations as if they were a transfer of the media product, such as how a “novel is turned into a film,” or how a scientific idea of pollution is turned into a campaign poster for Greenpeace. Strictly speaking, though, it is not the source media product that is transformed. Instead, it is the ideas, narratives, aesthetics, and concepts previously communicated in the source media product that are reproduced or reconstructed in the target media product. Therefore, in the process of transmediation, narratives, and ideas can only be transferred across media by being transformed. The analysis of transmediation investigates the interplay between medium specificity and transmediality: conducting a transmediation analysis means asking how the transmedial concepts and structures of a source media product are reconstructed in the target media products in a media-specific way. When we explore media representation, we analyze how one medium represents the characteristics of another medium. This occurs, for example, when a poem describes a painting not only by representing the image or the depicted scene but also by offering a depiction of the painting as an object. Media products constantly refer to and represent other media products, media types, or specific technical devices of display. By representing other technical devices and basic media types, a media product such as a video game also refers to the contexts and conventions of the represented media types. Therefore, media representation is sometimes discussed as an intermedial reference. By representing other media, media products almost by necessity draw on the history and content connected with the represented media. We can explore media representation in a constructed story world of a novel or a film, and we can also explore how the presentation of a narrative appears to represent structural patterns that are in fact transmedial but that we associate with certain specific media types. A literary text, for instance in Raymond Chandler’s prose, that focuses on visual and aural perception, and uses

Intermedial Studies

31

particular points of view, is perceived as having filmic traits. A feature film, such as Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, that does not tell a linear story and instead appears to repeat and vary a single theme may seem “musically structured” to the audience. Thus, transmediation and media representation are like two sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. A film can transmediate the plot of a novel without drawing much attention to its source, but it is forced to include a minimum of media representation, directly or indirectly, such as a comment that the film is “based on the novel by . . . .” Also, it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to represent other media types without representing narratives, ideas, and thoughts that are usually communicated via that particular kind of media type. In summary, combination, transmediation, and media representation may look like three independent categories typical for different media types, but that is not the case. Combination, transmediation, and media representation are analytical approaches, and thus two or even three of them can be used to explore the very same media product. A science documentary, for example, can be analyzed from the perspective of combination: the analysis will look at how moving images and auditory media types integrate. A documentary can also be interpreted as a transmediation if we analyze the adaptation process that turns scientific ideas into film. We can also study the role of different kinds of media that are represented in a documentary. No matter which aspect one chooses to focus on, one should at least consider how elements of the other two support the analysis.

CONCLUDING REMARKS In this chapter, we have offered a brief history of the academic study of intermedial relations as well as an introduction to some of the historical concepts related to intermedial relations. We have also provided definitions of the major analytical concepts that will be used throughout the book, namely media products, basic media, technical devices of display, and qualified media types. These are not different types of media, but dimensions of all specific media products. In a next step, we mentioned the three modalities (the material, sensorial, and spatiotemporal modalities) that, together, are the foundation of the semiotic modality, where the material preconditions turn into a meaning-making procedure, the semiosis. Toward the end of the chapter, we described two analytical procedures that will be used in the book: from a heteromedial perspective, the synchronic combination or integration of basic media aspects of a specific media product can be analyzed; the other perspective is transmediality, which deals with the

32

Chapter 1

diachronic relation of features in source and target media products. We have chosen to provide a relatively elaborate introduction to intermedial terminology and theory to assure that the case studies in the rest of the book will be understood easily. Another reason for doing so is that we want to make sure that our specific way of using terms will not be misunderstood, particularly because these terms are used in wider discussions in which they are given many different meanings.

NOTES 1. W. J. Mitchell, “There Are no Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257–266. 2. Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, eds., Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). 3. Bowen Wang, “Reformulating the Theory of Intermediality: A Genealogy from Ut Pictura Poesis to Poststructuralist Inbetweenness,” in Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, eds. Jørgen Bruhn et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2023). 4. Uta Degner and Norbert Christian Wolf, Der neue Wettstreit der Künste: Legitimation und Dominanz im Zeichen der Intermedialität (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010). 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. with Introduction and Notes, Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 6. Whose form and history are discussed in Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007). 7. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986). 8. John A. Bateman, Janina Wildfeuer, and Tuomo Hiippala, Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis; A Problem-Oriented Introduction (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017), 90. 9. Kamilla Elliot, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), as well as in Theorizing Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), provides a general and historic overview of medium specificity in film versus literature; Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 121–140, offers a discussion of film versus literature from a medium specificity perspective. For a discussion of the ideas of medium specificity and visual arts, see Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media.” 10. Transmediality has been investigated by, among others, Jan-Noël Thon, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, eds., Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Lincoln: Nebraska Paperback, 2014).

Intermedial Studies

33

11. Lars Elleström, Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 12. Lars Elleström, Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 13. There are magisterial overviews in Irina O. Rajewsky, Intermedialität (Tübingen, Germany: Francke, 2002) and Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 14. A good example, in the realm of the ecological crisis, is Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubittt, Ecomedia: Key Issues (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), see also Cajetan Nwabueze Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 15. Lars Elleström, “The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,” in Beyond Media Borders, Vol. 1: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media, ed. Lars Elleström (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 3–91. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. We employ the notion of ‘technical device of display’ as opposed to the term ‘technical media of display’ which is an established term in Elleström’s systematic terminology. We find that our term avoids confusion by stressing that, for instance, a book or a TV screen are better understood as relatively simply ‘devices’ instead of confusing the material objects with more semiotically complex basic and qualified media. 18. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994); Keith Oatley, The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume I: The Positive Affects (London: Tavistock, 1962); Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume II: The Negative Affects (London: Tavistock, 1963); Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume III: The Negative Affect; Anger and Fear (New York: Springer Publishing, 1991); Marco Caracciolo, Russell Hurlburt, and Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 19. See for example: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, “Synaesthesia: A Window into Perception, Thought and Language,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 12 (2001): 3–34; Gail Martino and Lawrence E. Marks, “Cross-Modal Interaction between Vision and Touch: The Role of Synesthetic Correspondence,” Perception 29 (2000): 745–754, https://doi​.org​/10​.1068​/p2984; Lars Elleström, “Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Dissimilar Media,” Palabra Clave 20, no. 3 (2017): 663–685, https://doi​.org​/10​.5294​/pacla​.2017​.20​.3​.4; Lars Elleström, “Bridging the Gap Between Image and Metaphor Through Cross-Modal Iconicity: An Interdisciplinary Model,” Dimensions of Iconicity, eds. Angelika Zirker et  al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 2017), 167–190; Felix Ahlner and Jordan Zlatev, “Cross-Modal Iconicity: A Cognitive Semiotic Approach to Sound Symbolism,” Sign Systems Studies 38, no. 1 (2010): 298–348. 20. Lars Elleström, “Identifying, Construing, and Bridging over Media Borders,” Scripta Uniandrade 16, no. 3 (2018): 25, https://doi​.org​/10​.5935​/1679​-5520​.20180043.

34

Chapter 1

For a thorough analysis of how sensorial aesthetics operate within Elleström’s concept of cross modal iconicity, see Niklas Salmose, “Sensorial Aesthetics: Cross-Modal Stylistics in Modernist Fiction,” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 10 (2020): 325–335, https://doi​.org​/10​.18778​/2083​-2931​.10​.18. 21. Succinctly introduced in Julia Simner, Synaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 22. As Bruhn and Schirrmacher explain, “[i]ndexical signs .  .  . relate to their objects based on contiguity: they signify that a certain object is or has been present.” Simply speaking, a footprint of a duck would testify to the fact that the duck has been present. Hence, the footprint has an indexical relation to the duck’s presence. Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, “Intermedial Studies,” in Bruhn and Schirrmacher, Intermedial Studies, 23. For a more detailed discussion of contiguity (and Peirce’s theory in general), see Lars Elleström, “Material and Mental Representation: Peirce Adapted to the Study of Media and Arts,” The American Journal of Semiotics 30 (2014): 83–138; or Elleström, “Modalities,” 3–86. 23. Following Elleström, “Modalities,” 73; see also Jørgen Bruhn, “Heteromediality,” in Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström, eds., Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders (New York: Routledge, 2020). 24. Lars Elleström refers to heteromediality as “the multimodal character of all media and, consequently, the a priori mixed character of all conceivable texts,” citing Bruhn, “Heteromediality,” 229. 25. Elleström, “Modalities,” 73.

Chapter 2

Intermedial Ecocriticism

Intermedial ecocriticism is intended to outline a broad-spectrum research goal where we combine the methods and theories of two diverse research traditions. The most general background of intermedial ecocriticism is the conviction that the ecological crisis and the climate crisis are not topics that are restricted to investigations in the natural sciences or that solutions to the crisis can be reduced to technological solutions. Instead, as environmental humanities have stressed time and time again, the crises relate to key questions in the humanities, and consequently, ecological and climate issues are “being reimagined as an ethical, societal, and cultural problem.”1 Ursula Heise frames this role of the humanities as a radical contrast to the technoscientific approach: The environmental humanities, by contrast [to the techno-scientific approach], envision ecological crises fundamentally as questions of socioeconomic inequality, cultural difference, and divergent histories, values, and ethical frameworks. Scientific understanding and technological problem-solving, essential though they are, themselves are shaped by such frameworks and stand to gain by situating themselves in this historical and sociocultural landscape.2

The alternative environmental humanities perspective that Heise argues in favor of is exactly in line with how we want to situate intermedial ecocriticism; more specifically, intermedial ecocriticism contributes to the explorations in ecocriticism and environmental humanities by stressing that ecological questions, because of their very definition, relate to questions of communication and thus representation (more on representation later in this chapter). In particular, intermedial ecocriticism emphasizes that environmental humanities and ecocriticism need a cross-disciplinary and cross-media 35

36

Chapter 2

analytical approach that matches the necessarily broad nature of the ecological crisis. Having scanned relevant areas of environmental humanities in general and ecocriticism more specifically, we find that such a cross-disciplinary and cross-media approach is lacking. This motivates our choice of intermedial ecocriticism as a theory and method that combines the highly relevant and urgent questions formulated in ecocriticism with intermedial studies’ approach to communication and representation across different media borders. The obvious problem of analyzing and comparing several quite different representations of the climate crisis—which is our aim—is that they fall into potentially very different categories, genres, or text types. According to the intermedial research tradition we are referring to in this book, the different media products belong more or less clearly to different media types.3 The fundamental medial differences, inherent in different media types, mean that it is hazardous to make critical comparisons between them, unless you decide, quite crudely, to consider the different media types as simply different boxes containing the same content. This is probably the reason why the communication fields mentioned in our introduction—for instance, risk and climate change communication—have mostly refrained from doing substantial comparisons across media borders. We ask, however, what options are available if the ideas concerning the climate crisis are to be analyzed in a fruitful way, because they are represented in a wide array of media forms. Instead of using the communication studies approach that has been developed mostly on social sciences foundations, we have been researching suitable theoretical foundations in the environmental humanities, and in particular in the field of ecocriticism.4 In this book, we pursue one particular way of utilizing the possibilities that the combined forces of ecocritical questions and intermedial theory and method offer regarding the comparability between very different media products. This chapter sketches some essential points of ecocriticism before developing the concept of intermedial ecocriticism as it will be used in the four case studies in this book. At the end of this chapter, we construct a methodological implementation of intermedial ecocriticism.

A SHORT HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF ECOCRITICISM The fields of environmental communication and science communication have the task of examining how research results are communicated to the public; this is often done through the transformation of scientific data into other media forms and popular culture. These research traditions also examine how the dissemination of information is implemented and how different forms of

Intermedial Ecocriticism

37

communication between different parts of society work. Environmental communication is a tool for creating awareness of changes in the environment and provoking action and agency, as well as a way to analyze framings of and responses to the available information.5 Another type of investigation of the communication of ecological questions has been conducted within ecocriticism. Originally part of and developed in literary studies, ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment surrounding humans in the world. It tries to answer questions such as how are human and nonhuman relationships represented in media products and what philosophical ideas are related to descriptions of “nature.” Initially, ecocritical scholars were often advocates for nature, but over time, their more central focuses have become environmental threats, crises, or emergencies.6 Ecocriticism deals with questions that have been acknowledged and discussed by philosophers, artists, writers, scientists, and politicians throughout many epochs and in many geographical areas, but Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America are often referred to as important works that started the environmental movement from which ecocriticism sprang.7 The starting point for ecocriticism as a discipline has been identified as Rueckert’s 1978 text, Literature and Ecology: Experiment in Ecocriticism, which coined the term that named the field.8 Scholars such as Cheryll ­Glotfelty, Harold Fromm, and Lawrence Buell divide ecocriticism into two waves loosely separated by time, material, and method.9 The first wave, they argue, took place during the 1980s and 1990s and focused predominantly on nature writing. Nature was seen as something separate and distinguished from culture and the human, and the literary objects of study were primarily from the North American and European spheres. The second wave started in the late 1990s and moved beyond the notion of Hegelian dualism and the romanticizing of nature. In the past two decades, a myriad of approaches have appeared, and ecocriticism has developed into a broad discipline with an interest in everything from animal studies to dystopias. Orientations such as Actor Network theory and New Materialism in ecocriticism highlight the interconnectedness and codependence of ecosystems that humans as well as nonhumans are a part of.10 By questioning the ontology of concepts like “nature” and “wilderness” and the inherent dichotomy between “humans” and “culture,” they illustrate how agency can be described as a force rather than an action. The related field of multispecies studies discusses how multispecies relations work by focusing on networks that exist between entities.11 One such example perceives the human body as an intersection where nature and culture meet and are inseparable since our bodies are home to millions of microbes (see an artistic illustration of this in figure 2.1).

38

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1  An example of an artistic representation of the relationships of our bodies with microbes, by Charis Tsevis. Source: Charis Tsevis, I, Virus: The Body, 2013. Also featured in Tina Hesman Saey, “Beyond the Microbiome: The Vast virome,” Science News 185, no. 1 (2014), 18-21. https://onlinelibrary​.wiley​.com​/doi​/full​/10​.1002​/scin​ .5591850115.

Intermedial Ecocriticism

39

Other important branches that have grown out of or borrowed ideas from ecocriticism are ecojustice, ecofeminism, queer ecology, and environmental postcolonialism.12 All of them highlight the junctions and liaisons between environmental destruction and social oppression. Many of these branches have roots in the environmental movement, the feminist movement, and other civil movements, but their approaches have changed and grown throughout the decades. Ecocriticism at the time of writing not only involves the analytical study of texts about nature or about the ecological crisis, but also the study of how the very concept of nature is defined in philosophical, cultural, social, and political senses. One influential definition going in that direction is that of Greg Garrard, who states that “the widest definition of the subject of ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between the human and the non-human, throughout human history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself.”13 With this turn, new scholarly attention has been given to indigenous and non-Western-centered perspectives on the relationship between nature and culture (the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) mentioned in the Introduction), and this has made room to analyze a broader range of genres, texts, and media types, including some that originate in geographical areas other than the Global North.14

ECOLOGICAL AGENCY One important and quite recent addition to the scholarship that has clear connections to communication studies (in particular regarding methodological aspects) is so-called empirical ecocriticism.15 As an interdisciplinary approach, empirical ecocriticism investigates the influence of environmental narratives on audiences, taking inspiration from reception studies and using experimental settings and theories of cognition, sociology, and psychology to measure responses to environmental media. One important goal of empirical ecocriticism is to present proof of claims made by ecocritical scholars about the importance of environmental media as tools for changing people’s opinions and creating agency regarding the climate emergency. Affect theory and cognitive science in relation to environmental issues have therefore become substantial branches of study since they deal with both positive and negative emotional responses and experiences. The empirical ecocriticism project (more on this later in this section) signifies part of an emerging, and very important, concern about the effectiveness and impact of what we will call “ecomedia” (that is, media that deal “with environmental issues, implicitly or explicitly” see more below). This concern

40

Chapter 2

can be phrased as ecological agency, and we construe it in this book as an important impulse. Ecological agency should not be confused with how agency in environmental humanities is sometimes discussed in subcategories such as speciesism and multispeciesism, where the basic idea is that all nonhuman entities have an agency of their own, not only insects or viruses but also natural phenomena such as oceans and trees. Ecological agency, as we will use it in our context, is a way to define and discuss how environmental and ecological communication—ecomedia—impact its receivers and how such ecomedia afford human agency in many different forms. In short, the concept helps us to find out how we can analyze the affordances that allow different media products, as part of different media types, to affect consumers in terms of their knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and actions on ecological issues. Most of this type of work has been done within the fields of environmental communication studies and climate change communication studies.16 These studies are limited to analyses of risk and health communication within journalism or mass media and focus on the measurable short- and long-term effects of simple transfers of information or knowledge. Therefore, they do not take into account the complexities of aesthetic communication, formal or stylistic elements, or specific contexts of communication. Many studies that discuss ecological agency are located within the research field of didactic research, analyzing the influence and use of environmental art in classroom situations for children and young adults, some of which deserve mentioning. Per Esben Myren-Svelstad, for example, argues in favor of establishing a sustainable literary competence in literature education.17 He defines ecological agency as something that occurs within a multifaceted postcritical reading that is done in the fashion described by Rita Felski, where a literary text meets the unpredictability of readers’ encounters with the text.18 In short, agency comes out of a pedagogical critical discourse that is part of literary collective discussions. This leads, Myren-Svelstad argues, to students obtaining a sustainable, literary competence.19 Natasha Blanchet-Cohen discusses how environmental concern is fostered among ten- to thirteen-yearolds and how it leads to strategic action, indicating “that a linear relationship between knowledge and motivation does not exist” and acknowledging the importance of feelings in creating ecological agency.20 In her study, she considers a broad range of medial material, such as museums, books, and nature documentaries in relation to children’s firsthand experiences of nature. She concludes that there is a need for a holistic approach to ecological agency, where a diversified set of experiences collaborate in critical ways: “The study shows that children interact with the environment at multiple levels and in several ways; influences that shape environmental involvement are varied

Intermedial Ecocriticism

41

and complex, including teachers, peers, parents, the Internet, and discovery of special places.”21 Although Malin Alkestrand does not look explicitly at issues concerning impact and agency, she focuses on dystopian literature and its potential to create and influence school debates on power relations and adult oppression.22 She suggests having firm teaching plans for pedagogical impact regarding how authoritarian ideologies can be reassessed within an ecological sphere, and she suggests considering what the pedagogical impact of this reassessment would be. Similarly, a collection edited by Växjö scholars Corina Löwe and Åsa Nilsson-Skåve uses media-specific case studies to exemplify how climate fiction can be utilized in school contexts to increase awareness and understanding of ecological issues.23 Niklas Salmose has written two articles on the (lack of) impact potential of climate fiction Hollywood blockbusters compared to less commercialized artistic films.24 Salmose contends that ecological agency is specifically related to the aesthetics of the film medium, in line with what Timothy Morton frames as ambient poetics.25 The edited collection Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film initiates a major investigation into how cinema reflects environmental issues, considering whether they manage to raise awareness and, if so, how they do this and how they produce agency. In the introduction, the question asked is whether cinema raises awareness of ecological issues as “a deceptively transparent medium” that creates “the illusion of an immediate, direct and objective access to reality.”26 Game studies have addressed the concept of agency more pervasively than most other fields; one explanation for this might be not only the increasing number of climate-oriented games but also the interactive function of games, which separates games from other aesthetic media types.27 Another important potential of climate games is their ability to bridge cultures and disciplines, giving them an advantage compared to more culturally and linguisticallycentered experiences. Klaus Eisenack investigates these specific advantages, analyzing the potential of the board game Keep Cool (2004) from a holistic perspective.28 Again, the impact here is closely affiliated with the classroom setting and the teacher-student relation. Joey J. Lee et al. promote action-oriented learning as the consequence of peer-generated user content in order to motivate informed environmental action.29 They conclude that each interactive possibility for a player “seems to have increased personal relevance and accessibility, giving players “a sense of meaningful accomplishment and reducing the feelings of fatalism common to the issue [of climate crisis].”30 Amy E. Chadwick confirms that “public understanding of and concern for climate change are particularly important to policymakers given the desire for

42

Chapter 2

public acceptance of policies and risk management procedures. In addition, assessing public understanding of climate change can guide public communication messages.”31 However, ecocritical studies that consider the power and impact of the broad plethora of ecomedia have largely been based on intuition or speculation, or, in the best cases, critical close readings. Antonia Mehnert, returning to literature, where ecocriticism began, writes that climate fiction is important because of the way it informs us about the specific ethical and social ramifications of the ecological crisis and how it contributes to shaping our ideas about climate change.32 Recent ground-breaking empirical work with a focus on ecocritical issues is a welcome initiative. Researchers in the newly established subcategory of ecocriticism, empirical ecocriticism, are critical of traditional classroom observations, as they emphasize the difficulties in separating the ecomedia product from the discourse of teaching, student discussions, and student cultivation.33 Their empirical work draws inspiration from within the ecocritical domain: from Alexa Weik von Mossner’s cognitive ecocriticism and from traditional hypotheses of the impact of ecomedia on readers.34 Empirical ecocritical researchers have looked empirically at the impact of climate fiction on the attitudes and behaviors of readers,35 and specifically at environmental injustice and climate migration.36 They have also investigated whether and how narratives can create empathy for nonhuman species, have conducted reception studies concerning animal fiction, and have carried out studies on the environmental effect of young adults sharing videos.37 Although studies within empirical ecocriticism have often been successful in terms of their quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue that they have been less successful in proving their hypotheses, and some questions have remained unanswered, as evidenced by some of their evaluations.38 This suggests that using qualitative methods such as QARS or similar in future empirical ecocritical work and using a different corpus might be productive.39 The transition from ecological crisis to ecological emergency shows an even more radical interest in the role ecomedia plays in action-oriented activities, in agency, and in communicating changed climate competencies.40 This rather extensive survey of the work on ecological agency serves the purpose of informing the case studies in this book. Chapter 6 will explicitly deal with these questions, but overall, this book is permeated by the belief that intermedial ecocriticism, although it is not an empirical field of study, serves as an important springboard for work that specifically investigates the role of media in ecological agency. It is our belief that the intermedial ecocritical method we are developing will increase interest in how successfully or unsuccessfully contemporary ecomedia communicates the emergency to the world.

Intermedial Ecocriticism

43

REPRESENTATION OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS Moving now from traditional ecocriticism to issues concerning mediation and media, we need to focus on the well-known thorny question of the representation of ecological questions. One of many important commentators on this question is Rob Nixon, who stresses the “formidable representational obstacles” of describing global warming.41 Nixon underlines the idea that the effect of the ecological crisis, usefully and famously termed “slow violence,” is “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.”42 This means, basically, that the dramatic effects of the ecological crisis have become a phenomenon that is drenched in an ocean of complicated representational issues. In recent ecocriticism concerning the representations of global warming, Morton’s idea of the “hyperobject” has been important but perhaps too influential in convincing many critics of the near-impossible task of understanding and therefore representing climate change as well as other aspects of the ecological crisis.43 We also acknowledge that the environmental crisis presents huge problems regarding grasping and representing the crisis, but we prefer to find other ways to confront this than through notions of unrepresentable “hyperobjects.” In this book, we will work with a pragmatic understanding of the abilities of representation, which has its basis in the foundations of intermedial theory as presented in chapter 1. Representation is a fundamental part of human communication; it is a process in which media products stand in for different material or mental phenomena, including so-called fictive and nonfictive characteristics. In line with their definition, representations cannot be identical to what they represent, and representation must be subject to performative aspects. Consequently, all representations necessarily function on a scale that extends from higher to lower precision and effect, depending not only on the media products involved but also on the context of sending and perceiving the media products. Taking as our starting point the fundamental representability of the world—whether in simple everyday objects, subjective affects, or complex scientific constellations of scientific facts (like climate change)—we argue that communicative representation by way of language and visual communication, as well as in any other semiotic form, is often quite efficient but is not a perfect communication tool. In principle, therefore, we do not wish to exaggerate the fundamental difference between how easy or difficult it is to represent the pencil on the table compared to representing the effects of climate change or the so-called sixth mass extinction.44

44

Chapter 2

Figure 2.2  An example of a scientific representation of the Sixth Mass Extinction. Source: Gerardo Ceballos et al., “Accelerated Modern Human–induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Science Advances 1, no. 5 (June 2015): 3, https://doi​ .org​/10​.1126​/sciadv​.1400253 https://www​.science​.org​/doi​/10​.1126​/sciadv​.1400253​#tab​ -citations.

ECOCRITICISM AND MEDIA Even though ecocriticism was originally a literary- and text-focused theory, most of the aforementioned perspectives can be and have been applied to a broad range of media forms. None of the media perspectives, however, have offered a method for comparing media types, like the approach we suggest here. The transformation of scientific work into aesthetic or other media types is often analyzed in relation to either monomedial categories (film, literature, or art) or in adaptation studies comparing source and target forms, for example, a novel and a movie.45 Although there are some research areas that work in close proximity to our proposed intermedial ecocriticism method, they negotiate the differences in media types through a broader cultural perspective or by pursuing a theme or trope. For example, Gregers Andersen uses the Anthropocene as an umbrella term for the ongoing environmental changes in his monograph.46 He examines the notion of the Anthropocene condition in literary fiction from a cultural perspective, with a focus on climate fiction novels. Among a host of books oriented toward the interrelations between visual art and the ecological crisis, Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin’s captures the intersections between contemporary art and the new conditions that the Anthropocene brings.47 A third example is Adam Trexler’s, which examines the novel as a literary form that can be used to represent aspects of climate change.48 While none of these examples explicitly engage with intermedial theory, all three investigate different ways to mediate and communicate the same issues that the Anthropocene evokes. There is, however, still a tendency in the research to compartmentalize or divide academic disciplines

Intermedial Ecocriticism

45

as well as different media types. Trexler deals only with narrative, Anglophone literature, Davis and Turpin are occupied with art in a broad sense, and Andersen deals with the narrative forms of literature and film. We do not wish to give the impression that there are currently no environmental humanities approaches that go in the direction we will propose here.49 One such approach has been suggested by cognitive cultural scholar Alexa Weik von Mossner in her work, which is part of the empirical ecocriticism project discussed earlier. Recently, while trying to overcome some of the problems inherent in the field, she defined “environmental narratives” as “any type of narrative in any media that foregrounds ecological issues and humannature relationships, often but not always with the openly stated intention of bringing about social change.”50 This broad definition (depending on how widely the notion of narrative is defined) may be compared with one of the shortest but, at the same time, most comprehensive definitions of ecocriticism provided by the influential literary ecocritic Gregg Garrard. Ecocriticism, for him, is “the study of the relationship between the human and the non-human, throughout human history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself.”51 Garrard’s and von Mossner’s definitions are valuable because they open up the perspective of a broad environmental investigation across media, as opposed to the many attempts, explained previously in this chapter, to analyze questions related to single media.52 However, even if these formulations raise the hope of a truly cross-disciplinary ecocritical approach across, in principle, all imaginable media types, it has not really been fulfilled yet. In Weik von Mossner’s study, which is built on a cognitive narratological foundation, the admirably broad corpus is restricted to fictive and nonfictive literary and cinematic narratives. Garrard’s definition has the potential to cross medial borders, but his own corpus mostly consists of literary material. A more promising attempt to situate media in environmental debate can be found in the field of ecomedia studies, from where we borrow the name of our corpus of texts. The textbook anthology Ecomedia offers a broad survey of different media types, including photography, cinema, advertising, new media, and gaming as well as other, mostly mass medial forms, which are discussed under three headings.53 “Frames” deals with visual media, “Flow” deals with broadcast media, and “Convergence” deals with the mixing and transforming of mostly nonaesthetic “new” media in contemporary culture. Ecomedia thus initiates a debate of crucial aspects of eco-related discussions in a number of qualified media types globally. However, the book does not define media, mediality, or mediation as such in any sustained form in the opening chapters of the book. As a result, the book gives ten well-structured and very informative medium-specific descriptions of specific media forms’ ways of relating to environmental questions through engaged case studies,

46

Chapter 2

but it does not produce general notions that enable comparisons to be made and discussions to be engaged in across the borders of media. As mentioned above, “ecomedia” in our book refers to any specific media product that, in any qualified media type, engages in representing in fiction or nonfiction (or a mix of these) either the reasons behind or the results of the ecological crisis, more specifically the threats of climate change. In summary, when scanning the very rich and stimulating field of ecocriticism, we find that ecocriticism, like the environmental humanities in general, is haunted by a methodological impasse in that it often tends to do one of two things. First, in terms of media types and academic disciplines, there is a tendency to “compartmentalize” the ecological questions, as if the ecological crisis respects the borderlines defined either by media types or by academic departmental traditions. This was what we remarked upon in our introduction in relation to Hubbell and Ryan’s logical but problematic structure of their environmental humanities textbook.54 Second, when cultural theorists with broader interests that span media types and academic disciplines examine ecological representations, it is performed without a solid methodological and theoretical ground. Cultural theorists usually lack a well-defined common ground to compare, say, a scientific article with a fictional science fiction film. INTERMEDIAL ECOCRITICISM What is needed, we argue, is an approach that can analyze and compare media products across a very broad range of different media types that, in Simon Estok’s words, deal “with environmental issues, implicitly or explicitly.”55 We thus propose a cross-medial ecocritical approach in which media products from a wide range of media types could not only be analyzed but also critically compared in meaningful ways. This method would open avenues to investigate the broad corpus of ecomedia by applying theory and methods from intermedial studies. Thus, we aim to show that the rich insights of contemporary ecocritical thinking can be productively combined with the analytical strengths of intermedial studies. Again, this is what we call intermedial ecocriticism, and below we define the structure of this method. METHOD FOR PERFORMING A COMPARATIVE INTERMEDIAL ECOCRITICAL ANALYSIS Although it may be a generalization, the question of method in the humanities has had a very hard time standing up against the tornado of “Theory” that was blasted across the humanities from the 1970s. Theory was the pathway

Intermedial Ecocriticism

47

for the ambitious student or scholar to pursue as opposed to older, more method-oriented approaches that in literary or cultural studies were connected to, for instance, a biographical method or a historical-sociological method, two methods that both rely quite heavily on empirical data. From the 1970s until relatively recently,56 method was considered a no-go for prominent representatives of cultural studies. This was true of American critic Susan Sontag when she attacked the notion of “interpretation” (which in many ways is synonymous with method),57 and of the French writer and critic Roland Barthes and his many admirers, who, for instance, found that the meticulous so-called “studium” was an academic, tedious activity as opposed to the more existential experience of “punctum.”58 A third example is the German literary theorist Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht who, quite late in his career, in 2004, found that the true aim of the humanities should indeed go against “interpretation” and the quest for meaning and should instead pursue the perception of “presence.”59 Therefore, before proceeding further, we will say a few words about what we mean when we say we are suggesting a method for conducting intermedial ecocritical research. Our method offers a modest procedure for analyzing and comparing ecomedia that includes a certain measure of openness and creativity. We attempt to use this method to facilitate traffic between two theories (ecocriticism and intermedial studies) and specific close readings of media products. The method is thus meant to lead to interesting individual results and not just to demonstrate the efficiency of a theory or a method. Our method consists of three phases. Step 1 consists of the procedure of selecting appropriate ecomedia material and choosing the specific research topic, theme, or trope to investigate. This is followed by a detailed intermedial description in step 2, which discusses the specificities, possibilities, and affordances of each ecomedia product. Step 3 facilitates an intermedial interpretation (and a comparative one if working with more than one ecomedia product) of the research topic in relation to the selected ecomedia product or products. The intermedial ecocriticism method therefore opens up the possibility of comparing a specific media product with other media products with a directly comparable subject matter. If this step is taken, then a second, third, or fourth, media product must of course be subjected to the steps described above before conducting the comparative step. Step 1: Selection of Material and Research Topics (What and Why) The initial move, before any detailed analysis begins, is to choose one or more media products whose subject matter relates to ecological issues. The choice of a media product or products, the what, chosen from the large

48

Chapter 2

corpus of ecomedia, is followed by the choice of a specific question or topic to be investigated in relation to the chosen media product(s)—this is the why. The number of possible topics is in principle infinite, but it could include anything from the representation of the ecological crisis to narrative aspects of the ecomedia product to the ways in which the media product offers different forms of human agency in the Anthropocene—or temporal patterns in Anthropocene representations. It will come as no surprise that the initial choice of topic has important consequences because it will direct the analysis of the media product. If one works with more than one media product, the chosen topic will be the one that is being compared. To briefly exemplify the intermedial terms, we will work with a short story, “Zoogoing,” by Lydia Millet, from a collection of climate-related narratives.60 The peculiar and disturbing “Zoogoing” is set in a realistic, contemporary USA, and it deploys a classic theme of the gifted young man looking for a purpose in life who has problems adjusting to the social world. This young man, called T, chooses to get as close as possible to animals, but not because he wants to find the animal in himself or because he wants to leave behind his unsatisfying social habits and reach a fuller, more authentic animal life. Instead, T wants to experience what it feels like to be the last example of a species. While many species are “busy being extincted,” T wants to feel alone, radically alone, and he invests lots of time and energy in living with animals in different zoos around the world. Hence, very briefly, we discuss how the short story mediates basic scientific ideas about species extinction. Step 2: Intermedial Description Step 2 begins by establishing the technical device of display that characterizes the chosen media product(s); here the researcher can choose the technical device of display through which he or she has received the media product, or the researcher can describe the typical or most widespread display function for the specific media product. After establishing the technical device of display, the material, spatiotemporal, sensorial, and semiotic categories of the basic media dimension of the media product are described. Regarding the basic media aspects of Millet’s short story, the material aspect would include paper and ink because we read the short story in the printed version of the book. The spatiotemporal aspect would include the fact that the conventional way to read the short story would be to read the text in the sequence produced by the author, even though it is possible, with a written text, to read it in your own preferred way. In sensorial

Intermedial Ecocriticism

49

terms, a printed short story is predominantly perceived via the eyes (and ears, to a lesser extent), and the fundamental semiotic aspect of the short story would include the fact that the written text is mainly interpreted by way of its symbolic sign qualities. The aim of the second step is to establish a precise and detailed intermedial description of the media product(s) that will result in a clear understanding of the different affordances of a media product, creating the foundation for the intermedial analysis and, if more than one ecomedia product is used, the comparison between media products. Step 3: Intermedial Analysis and Comparison The aim of step 3 is to analyze and compare the media product by way of intermedial terms and theories. The heteromedial and the media transformation aspects can be put to use, as well as other intermedial analytical and descriptive tools. The aim of the analysis is to specify the affordances of the qualified media type as this plays out in the specific ecomedia product(s) regarding its ability to represent ecological topics. Generally, the media transformation aspect may loom large in many intermedial ecocritical analyses because all ecomedia products are fundamentally, from an intermedial point of view, media transformations of source material regarding the ecological crisis that turn into ecomedia. In terms of media transformation, Millet’s text can, for instance, be interpreted as an example of how scientific notions of species extinction, first published in natural scientific articles and reports and then an aspect of popular scientific writing and campaigns, for instance, related to natural parks or zoos, have been transferred and transformed by an author into the format of a literary, fictional short story. From the media combination perspective, the interplay between different media types or media products represented in the short story can be analyzed. In step 1, we can also look into how the use of different aesthetic styles or devices as well as complex intermedial constellations within media-specific frameworks collaborate to convey a wider message. The aim of the third step of the analysis is to understand which aspects, in this case climate change and species extinction, can be mediated into a literary short story (as a media type), and in our example into the short story “Zoogoing” (as a media product). To a certain extent, the analysis may confirm rather general conclusions, but it adds significant precision in pinpointing the exact affordances of the general media type and the specific media product. In our much more elaborated case studies, we demonstrate the usefulness of this step.

50

Chapter 2

NOTES 1. Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys, “Climate Change and the Imagination,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 4 (2011): 517, https://doi​.org​ /10​.1002​/wcc​.117. 2. Ursula K. Heise, “Introduction: Planet, Species, Justice—And the Stories We Tell About Them,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, eds. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2. 3. Lars Elleström, Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021); Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, eds., Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media (Oxon: Routledge, 2022). 4. Among the publications from the group of scholars in Växjö that we are part of, the following have paved some of the way leading to this book, Jørgen Bruhn, “Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Anthropocene Ecological Crisis across Media and the Arts,” Ekphrasis 24, no. 2 (December 2020): 5–18, https://doi​.org​/10​.24193​/ ekphrasis​.24​.1; Jørgen Bruhn, “Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism,” in Beyond Media Borders, Volume 2: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media, ed. Lars Elleström (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); 117–148; Lars Elleström, “Representing the Anthropocene: Transmediation of Narratives and Truthfulness from Science to Feature Film,” Ekphrasis 24, no. 2 (December 2020): 36–48, https://doi​ .org​/10​.24193​/ekphrasis​.24​.3. Niklas Salmose, “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films,” Journal of Popular Culture 51 (2018): 1415–1433; Niklas Salmose, “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency,” in Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability, eds. Andressa Schröder et al. (London: Transcript Verlag, 2019), 239–256; Niklas Salmose, “Three Transmediations of the Anthropocene: An Intermedial Ecocritical Reading of Facts, Sci-Fi, PopSci and Eco-horror,” in Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders, eds. Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström (New York: Routledge, 2020), 254–273. 5. For references to these important fields, see Bruhn, Davidsson, Salmose, “The Ecological Crisis and Intermedial Studies,” forthcoming 2024 in The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Asun Lopéz Varela, Miriam Viera), Palgrave MacMillan, London. 6. Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Peter Barry and William Welstead, eds., Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities (Manchester University Press, 2017); Hubert Zapf, “Posthumanism or Ecohumanism? Environmental Studies in the Anthropocene,” Journal of Ecohumanism 1, no. 1 (January 2022): 5–17, https://doi​.org​/10​.33182​/joe​.v1i1​.1743​.s2022; Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

Intermedial Ecocriticism

51

7. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 8. William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: Experiment in Ecocriticism,” The Iowa Review 9, no. 1 (1978): 71. 9. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996) and Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005). 10. Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism. 11. See the essays collected in Ida Bencke and Jørgen Bruhn, eds., Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2022); Eben Kirksey, The Multispecies Salon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 12. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015); Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); Richard Grusin, Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 13. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2012), 5. 14. Joni Adamson and Salma Monani, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (New York: Routledge, 2017). 15. As presented by, among others, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner and Wojciech P. Małecki, “Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Texts and Environmental Methods,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 27, no. 2 (2020): 327–336. 16. Suzannah Evan Comfort and Young Eun Park, “On the Field of Environmental Communication: A Systematic Review of the Peer-Reviewed Literature,” Environmental Communication 12, no. 7 (September 2018): 862–875, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /17524032​.2018​.1514315. See also Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose, eds., “Intermedial ekokritik,” in Ekokritiska metoder, eds. Camilla Brudin Borg, Jørgen Bruhn, and Rikard Wingård (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2022), 235; Susanne C. Mose, “Reflections on Climate Change Communication Research and Practice in the Second Decade of the 21st Century: What More is There to Say?” Wire’s Climate Change 7 (2016): 345–369, https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/wcc​.403. Amy E. Chadwick, “Climate Change Communication,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, September 26, 2017, https://doi​ .org​/10​.1093​/acrefore​/9780190228613​.013​.22. 17. Per Esben Myren-Svelstad, “Sustainable Literary Competence: Connecting Literature Education to Education for Sustainability,” Humanities 9, no. 4 (December 2020): 1–19. 18. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), as cited in Myren-Svelstad, “Sustainable Literary Competence,” 2. 19. Ibid.

52

Chapter 2

20. Natasha Blancher-Cohen, “Taking a Stance: Child Agency Across the Dimensions of Early Adolescents’ Environmental Involvement,” Environmental Education Research 14, no. 3 (2008): 258. 21. Ibid., 269. Blanchet-Cohen’s arguments are related to a recently discussed concept of the “knowledge-action gap,” which is concerned with the question of why there is such a gap between knowledge of the climate crisis and a willingness to do something about it. For an introduction to this, see Reto Knutti, “Closing the Knowledge-Action Gap in Climate Change,” One Earth 1, no. 1 (September 2019): 21–23, https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.oneear​.2019​.09​.001. 22. Malin Alkestrand, Mothers and Murderers: Adult’s Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature (Göteborg: Makadam, 2021). 23. Corina Löwe and Åsa Nilsson Skåve, Didiaktiska perspektiv på hållbarhetsteman i barn- och ungdomslitteratur (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2020). 24. Salmose, “The Apocalyptic Sublime,” and Salmose, “Behemoth.” 25. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 26. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, ed., Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 7. 27. For an introduction to intermedial aspects of games, see Péter Kristóf Makai, “Media and Modalities: Computer Games” and “A Toolkit for Intermedial Analysis of Computer Games,” in Bruhn and Schirrmacher, Intermedial Studies, 69–85 and 309–328. For further reading about the intersection of game studies, environmental humanities and ecocriticism, see Hans-Joachim Backe, “Greenshifting Game Studies: Arguments for an Ecocritical Approach to Digital Games,” First Person Scholar, March 19, 2014, http:// www​.firstpersonscholar​.com​/greenshifting​-game​-studies/; Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Joost Raessens, “Ecogames: Playing to Save the Planet,” in Cultural Sustainability, eds. Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl (London: Routledge, 2018), 232–246. Benjamin J. Abraham, Digital Games after Climate Change (Cham: Springer, 2022). 28. Klaus Eisenack, “A Climate Change Board Game for Interdisciplinary Communication and Education,” Simulation & Gaming 44, no. 2–3 (April–June 2012): 328–348. 29. Joey J. Lee et al., “GREENIFY: A Real-World Action Game for Climate Change Education,” Simulation & Gaming 44, no. 2–3 (2013): 349–365. 30. Ibid., 258. On a similar subject, in “Grim FATE: Learning About Systems Thinking in an In-Depth Climate Change Simulation,” Simulation & Gaming 49, no. 2 (April 2018): 168–194, https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1046878117753498, David I. Waddington and Thomas Fennewald conduct an empirical study of how the game Fate of the World (2011), a global warming simulation game, stimulates and promotes systems thinking about climate change. 31. Chadwick, “Climate.” 32. Antonia Mehnert, Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (Los Angeles: Springer Nature, 2016), 4. 33. Schneider-Mayerson, Weik von Mossner and Małecki, “Empirical Ecocriticism,” 328.

Intermedial Ecocriticism

53

34. Nancy Easterlin, “‘Loving Ourselves Best of All’: Ecocriticism and the Adapted Mind,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 37, no. 3 (2004): 1–18, http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/44030043. 35. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers,” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 2 (November 2018): 473–500, https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​/22011919​-7156848; Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “Disaster Movies and the ‘Peak Oil’ Movement: Does Popular Culture Encourage Eco-Apocalyptic Beliefs in the United States?” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 7, no. 3 (2013): 289–314, https://hdl​.handle​.net​/1911​/75104. 36. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “‘Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 337–364, https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isaa020. 37. Wojciech P. Małecki et al., “Feeling for Textual Animals: Narrative Empathy Across Species Lines,” Poetics 74, no. 101334 (June 2019): 1–8; Wojciech P. Małecki et al., “Literary Fiction Influences Attitudes Toward Animal Welfare,” PLOS ONE 11, no. 12 (December 2016), https://doi​.org​/10​.1371​/journal​.pone​.0168695; Pat Brereton and Victoria Gómez, “Media Students, Climate Change, and YouTube Celebrities: Readings of Dear Future Generations: Sorry Video Clip,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 385–405, https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isaa021. The empirical research done by IGEL has this far utilized the detailed questionnaire as a method; it contains multiple choice and open-ended questions. The corpus has contained established ecomedia (short stories, videos, and films), and in one case constructed inauthentic texts (Matthew SchneiderMayerson et al., “Environmental Literature as Persuasion: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Reading Climate Fiction,” Environmental Communication (September 2020): 1–16, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/17524032​.2020​.1814377. 38. Wojciech P. Małecki, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Małgorzata Dobrowolska, “Narrating Human and Animal Oppression: Strategic Empathy and Intersectionalism in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?’,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 365–384, https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/ isaa023. 39. QARS is a questioning strategy that emphasizes that a relationship exists between the question, the text, and the background of the reader. 40. The approach to the crisis as an emergency can be contributed to 5 December 2016, when Darebin Council, Australia, unanimously voted to recognize we are in a state of climate emergency that requires urgent action by all levels of government, including local councils. See the Climate emergency declaration and plan at Darebin City Website: https://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/ Waste-environment-and-climate/Climate-and-sustainability/Darebins-climate-action/ Climate-emergency-declaration-and-plan. 41. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 42. Ibid. 43. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For a critical discussion

54

Chapter 2

of Morton’s notion of hyperobjects, see Elizabeth Boulton, “Climate Change as a ‘Hyperobject’: A Critical Review of Timothy Morton’s Reframing Narrative,” Wire’s Climate Change (June: 2016): 772–785, https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/wcc​.410. 44. For a broad introduction to the question of representation, see Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, eds., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2013). 45. E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 46. Gregers Andersen, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene (New York: Routledge, 2020). 47. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015). See also the beefy catalogues documenting the rich “thought exhibitions” of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020); Also, see Bruno Latour and Christophe Leclercq, Reset Modernity! (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016). 48. Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (London: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 49. For a broader literature review regarding the background, see Bruhn, Davidsson, Salmose, “The Ecological Crisis and Intermedial Studies.” 50. Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2017), 3. 51. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 5. 52. Many media types outside literature have been under ecocritical (in the broad sense of the word) scrutiny. Here we mention a few significant examples, for instance in film studies (E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future of in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016) and visual art (Adam Brenthel, “The Drowning World: The Visual Culture of Climate Change” (PhD diss., Lund University, 2016); T.J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), and also in gaming Alenda Y. Chang, “Games as Environmental Texts,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 57–84; music (Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, eds., Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (New York: Routledge, 2016); Heidi Hart, Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster (Cham: Springer International, 2018)), and design Aaris Sherin, Sustainable Thinking: Ethical Approaches to Design and Design Management (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), to mention just some of the more recent publications in a rapidly expanding field. // See also Bruhn, Davidsson, Salmose, “The Ecological Crisis and Intermedial Studies.” 53. Sean Cubitt, Salma Monani and Stephen Rust, Ecomedia: Key Issues (New York: Routledge, 2016). 54. Andrew J. Hubbell and John Ryan, Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (Oxon: Routledge, 2022).

Intermedial Ecocriticism

55

55. Simon C. Estok, “Virtually There: ‘Aesthetic Pleasure of the First Order,’ Ecomedia, Activist Engagement,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Envi­ ronment 24, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 17, note 1, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isw087. In that sense, our approach can be compared to the loosely defined field of “environmental communication.” In a systematic overview of this multidisciplinary field, Comfort and Park mention that it is not easily defined and that it lies close to the more wellknown fields of science communication and risk communication, Comfort and Park, “On the Field,” 863. 56. Even a decade ago (in the early 2010s), trends such as digital humanities and, in literary studies, ideas about “distant reading”, could be identified more like method-oriented approaches—and this was at a time when the natural sciences were viewed with considerably less suspicion than the humanities. See Zapf, “Posthumanism or Ecohumanism?” 57. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Laurel Edition, Dell, 1969). 58. Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). 59. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004). 60. Lydia Millet, “Zoogoing,” in I’m With the Bears, ed. Mark Martin (London: Verso, 2011).

Chapter 3

From Climate Science to Agency?

Now that we have explained the basics of our procedure, we will present our first example of how to conduct a comparative study of two ecomedia products. We have taken pains to be clear and pedagogical here to illustrate the analytical procedure; this means that we can be slightly less rigorous later on. The two media products we focus on in this chapter are an online article that can be found on the popular British science website CarbonBrief and Den afskyelige, a climate fiction (cli-fi) novel by Danish writer Charlotte Weitze. We divide this chapter into three parts: in parts 1 and 2, we do the intermedial analyses of the two media products, and then we do the intermedial comparison in part 3. PART 1: CARBONBRIEF ARTICLE Step 1: Selection and Presentation of Material and Research Topics The general aim of conducting this case study, apart from presenting the first example of our research procedure, is to compare intermedially how two media types offer two ways of making complicated natural science accessible to the general public. More specifically, how do the two media products represent natural scientific research related to climate change, and how do these representations promote ecological agency? The first ecomedia product is an article written by Daisy Dunne, “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely’.”1 It was published on August 2, 2019 on www​.CarbonBrief​.org, which is an internet-based, fact-oriented media outlet situated in London 57

58

Chapter 3

and funded by the European Climate Foundation, a large private fund supporting numerous European climate change projects. Even though the website often focuses on topics related to the UK, the material also has a global outlook. CarbonBrief publishes news articles, comments, and other scienceand policy-related materials dealing with global warming issues, including regularly published scientific reports (like that of the IPCC) and new findings. Since it is web-based, it does not offer printed versions of its material. The article can be found at https://www​ .carbonbrief​ .org​ /climate​ -change​ -made​-europes​-2019​-record​-heatwave​-up​-to​-hundred​-times​-more​-likely. The popular scientific article that we are interested in consists of about 1250 words, one photograph, and two temperature maps of Europe, as well as an embedded tweet.2 The general aim of the article is not only to support the scientific hypothesis that the planet’s global temperature is rising due to anthropogenic influence but also to argue that different dramatic events signify this new planetary condition, which is analyzed in a new and more exact manner by way of so-called attribution science. Attribution science links specific weather phenomena with more general developments in the climate, typically by being able to say that a certain dramatic weather phenomenon has been made x times more plausible due to the significant effects of anthropogenic climate change.3 It therefore has clear advantages compared to more traditional climate science predictions: in traditional predictions, scientists have generally been very cautious when linking specific, often dramatic, weather phenomena with the larger developments in climate change (which confuses the classic distinction in climate science between weather and climate). So how does the article make this link? And can the article be meaningfully compared to another media product with approximately the same aim? Step 2: Intermedial Description Given the fact that CarbonBrief is a web-only publication, any reading of the text will take place via a screen, typically on a computer or a mobile phone. In our analysis of the text, the technical device of display is a laptop computer screen. The basic media types are written texts, photography, and graphics (maps). The material aspect of the article, as displayed on a computer screen, is the two-dimensional space upon which one can read texts and see images by way of the technical apparatus that makes things visible on a screen, for instance, by scrolling up or down on the page. An internet connection—that is, being part of a larger societal and technical infrastructure—is also necessary to be able to reach the website at all. Another part of the material aspect is the fact that the cost of reproducing images on a website is lower (but of course

From Climate Science to Agency?

59

not free of charge) than for a printed article, and several color photos and/or color data visualizations are an integrated part of almost all CarbonBrief’s articles. In the article we are analyzing, there is a large color photograph documenting a man shielding himself with a newspaper during the heat wave in London in July 2019, and two visualizations of historical heat patterns in Europe. The spatiotemporal organization of the media product is more complicated. On a superficial level, the online article has many similarities with a printed article. However, there are several highlighted words, that is, hypertext links, in the article (twenty in all) that function more or less like footnotes in a printed text, meaning that when the reader follows such a hypertext link, he or she is redirected to another text. However, the function of a hypertext reference, as used here, and a footnote are not the same.4 Historically, footnotes and other references are a sophisticated aspect of (most) scientific works in all disciplines, and although they are an aspect of the technical device of display of the book as a physical object, they also allow or afford some content-related functions that relate each footnote more to the dimension of qualified media.5 Whereas the function of a footnote is, conventionally, to offer a short additional remark and/or a specific reference, the hypertext link in a digital text redirects the reader to another webtext (be it an article, a news item, or something else) that the reader gains access to. The readers can hit the back button on the browser to return to “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely’,” but they may get lost or simply become more interested in the new website and therefore not return to the original one. In spatiotemporal terms, we can say that a hypertext link affords a temporal and spatial sequence that differs from the strict and relatively simple spatiotemporal sequence of a printed article. The rather strict sequence of reading a conventionally written article is broken up into a more fluid and potentially less restricted (in space and time) form. Compared to the limited length of a written article, an online article with hypertext links is potentially infinite if one follows the links into new links and into more new links, and so on, but in practical terms, most readers of this sort of articles will stay in the editorial neighborhood, so to speak. It is worth mentioning that most of the hypertext references in the article are “in-house” links: they lead to CarbonBrief articles that go into more depth about some of the topics in the article, which is of course attractive for CarbonBrief. The sensorial dimension of a digital article on the internet does not differ significantly from that of a written text: the visual interface is perceived via the eyes. However, when clicking around in the article, a bodily movement of the fingers (which also involves the hand and the arm), on either a keyboard

60

Chapter 3

or an external mouse is needed, which initiates a sensorial element of touch, too, as well as the possibility of, for instance, enlarging an image if the article is read on a smart phone. The semiotic aspect of the article combines the three sign relations in intricate patterns, as suggested by Peirce (as do all media products, in principle). The written text must be read as symbolic signs designating verbal language: the photograph and the two visualizations, on the other hand, must be read as two kinds of mainly but not only iconic representations. The photograph in the article iconically signifies extreme heat, which is represented by a male figure, whereas the two visualizations and the map in the embedded tweet that follow consist of maps of Europe. In the first one, colored areas symbolically signify (via symbolic color codes) the heat at a given moment in the summer of 2019. In the next map, the extent of heat waves from 1950 to 2018 as compared to the summer of 2019 is illustrated. Major aspects of the article rely on the indexical sign function in the sense that many of the most important facts in the text as well as in the visualizations are representations of indexical measurements, that is, measurements taken during natural scientific investigations that use a variety of measuring instruments; it is these measurements that have been collected and represented in the text. The descriptive part of the analysis can now be summed up. The general media type is the popular scientific journal article, which is technically displayed by way of computer screens or other electronic devices. This technical aspect leads directly into the material aspect relating to the basic possibilities that an electronic text offers (in comparison with a printed text). An important fact here is that a good number of photographs and other illustrations can be included, even if only three have been chosen for this particular article. And the possibilities inherent in the hypertexts, understood as part of the spatiotemporal setup, are crucial when it comes to referring the reader, via links, to other texts. In sensorial terms, human sight dominates, but touch is implied too. In semiotic terms, all three sign relations play a role; the mainly iconic images are combined with the mainly symbolic verbal parts; and the entire article’s raison d’être is based on a notion of the indexical relations inherent in scientific work. We hope that with this initial description of the media product we have exemplified that even if such an account is rather banal and perhaps somewhat tedious, it nevertheless has the potential to demonstrate that understanding the elementary medial setup of a media product conveys significant aspects—but now we can move on toward the aspects of the text that the cultural sciences would normally feel more comfortable thinking about, namely the content and form aspects: what it is about, and how it is formed.

From Climate Science to Agency?

61

Step 3: Intermedial Analysis Based on the intermedial descriptions, we can approach the general affordances of the media product. As mentioned in the theoretical introduction, affordances should not be seen as objective characteristics of the media product or, more generally, of media types: affordances are the possibilities and limitations that the media product offers—but not all of these are necessarily actualized in a specific reader’s meeting with the text. The popular scientific article, as a qualified media type, is a classic example of science communication, and it contributes to what science communication studies calls the “public understanding of science.”6 More specifically, the article is part of the field of environmental communication, which has exploded in recent years. The purpose of the article is to communicate complex scientific research to the general public that concerns findings from climate science in general and findings from so-called attribution science in particular. The article tries to cater for nonspecialist readers and thus to contribute to the “public understanding of science.” If we reformulate this in intermedial terms, we can say that the CarbonBrief writer Daisy Dunne performs a media transformation, transforming the qualified medium of one or more scientific article(s), which is the originating background or source, into the new media type of a popular science web-based article. A basic demand of popular science communication of complex research results is to simplify the content, that is, making complex or comprehensive material understandable and recognizable to the reader. So there is an immediate element in the media transformation that consists in cutting out and “translating” technical terms, highly formalized terminology, and numbers or graphs that are difficult to transform into something that “makes sense” to lay readers.7 In this article, the journalist’s main source is a report carried out in the field of attribution studies: this thirty-two-page scientific study with all of the necessary data is then condensed into a very short online article.8 In addition to omitting most of the detailed data and references from the originating report, the CarbonBrief article refers to a news item in The Guardian, to other CarbonBrief explainers of technical terms, and to an interview with a scientist. It also engages with other material that informs the reader about the remarkable and scary heat records of 2019 (which were recently superseded by 1.5°C only three years later, in 2022). In short, the journalist has gone through at least a dozen articles and sources, added an interview, and borrowed graphs from the source report, all in order to produce a short, condensed, nonspecialist description of the extreme weather phenomenon. The result is an abbreviated, effective, and digestible article about a scientifically complex subject.

62

Chapter 3

Simultaneously with simplifying and cutting out material, the writer faces a more constructive task: finding appropriate ways to represent the ideas that have been researched in the natural sciences. In intermedial terms, the media transformation aspect connects to the media combination aspect: the task of representing the facts of the scientific findings can be partly solved by way of choosing and combining different media aspects and modalities. The most important combination aspect in the article is between—in Peircean terms—the signs meant to be interpreted as iconic signs (the photograph and the two maps in color) and the written text consisting mainly of symbolic signs. The written text dominates in the meaning-making of the message (in the sense that the text could more or less stand alone and still be meaningful without the images—the opposite is not the case), but the iconic features are very important. The title of the article, written at the top of the photograph, designates the entire article’s content: “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely.’” This is also, however, a complex verbal utterance: taking as its starting point the 2019 record heat wave, it connects the dramatic weather event to a larger historical trend and stresses that heat waves are becoming more frequent and warmer as a result of human-produced global warming. This is the most important conclusion of the underlying research. The title also contains a quote with no obvious author name attached to it, but its origin becomes clear as one reads the article. The rest of the article substantiates this headline and backs up the claim with the aid of three main supporting elements: quotes and reported quotes from scholars; material referred to in the hyperlinks, of which several instances are current measurements of the temperatures around Europe; and visual material. The quotes and the material referred to in the hyperlinks build an argument containing theoretical and historical claims combined with scientific measurements that, together, aim at producing the overall message, which has a narrative form. From the individual experience (heat wave in London) to a more general fact (heat all over Europe) as part of a more elaborate trend (heat in Europe over time), it narrates an argument that moves from the specific to the general. The mainly iconic material, on the other hand, is organized to support that narrative form. The photograph in figure 3.1 creates an individual, human engagement, which in the second map is made into a condition for European citizens. In the second, historically oriented map (see figure 3.2), the heat wave in 2019 attains a more comprehensive pattern. The pictures tell a rudimentary story that backs up, or rather repeats, what is in the written text. The pictures tell us that our individual experiences must be taken seriously (photograph of a man in heat wave) and that the heat wave was probably more than a mere coincidence; it was a European phenomenon (figure 3.1), and not only that,

From Climate Science to Agency?

63

Figure 3.1  The map used in the CarbonBrief article, “Data Visualisation of Air Temperatures over Europe on Thursday, 25 July at 16:00 BST. Created with Ventusky.” Source: Daisy Dunne, “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely’,”CarbonBrief, August 2, 2019, Climate change made Europe’s 2019 record heatwave up to “100 times more likely” (carbonbrief​.o​rg).

the extreme weather can be explained by referring to historical climate models (figure 3.2), which give the initial individual experience a totally new meaning. There is another aspect of media combination to discuss, namely the use of hyperlinks in the text, which has been mentioned earlier. It should come as no surprise that technical and material aspects of a text affect its meaningmaking; in the case of the article, the spatiotemporal nature of the digital text, in particular, has certain effects, which are best understood by comparing it to a conventional, printed news article. As noted earlier, a journalist producing a digitally disseminated text can usually use colored illustrations and photographs to accompany the text (from a bureau providing images) without encountering technical difficulties or limits because of space, as compared to a printed article in a newspaper or a magazine, and this is of course a positive aspect of an online publication. And from the point of view of the reader, the use of visual material can make the article easier to read and more informative. Apart from the overall graphic layout of the article, which is made possible by the digital platform, a digital text like this facilitates an easily navigated

64

Chapter 3

Figure 3.2  The historical map used in the CarbonBrief article, “The Rank of Annual Maximum Temperatures Observed in Europe in 2019 When Compared to 1950-2018.” Source: Daisy Dunne, “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely’,”CarbonBrief, August 2, 2019, Climate change made Europe’s 2019 record heatwave up to ‘100 times more likely’ (carbonbrief​.o​rg).

reference system that relates it to other digital texts, including references to other media (the BBC, for instance) as well as meteorological sites and scientific texts. Also, in order to avoid explaining all the scientific background facts, the CarbonBrief article has several “internal” or in-house references to its own material published previously. The article ends by referring to other related articles in which the points it makes are deepened or discussed. Referring to other news outlets or to published material is not unique to the affordances of the specific technical device aspect of digital journalism (it is used in other media, too); the point is that reaching these references only requires one click. The final feature that distinguishes this article from a printed text is that readers can comment on the text immediately. CarbonBrief employs a feedback system called Disqus, which prevents anonymous comments and only accepts comments from registered users.9 Several of these features exist in a printed article of a newspaper or a journal or magazine, but the difference in this article in this respect is that the references to very comprehensive

From Climate Science to Agency?

65

material outside the text are much more elaborate and easier to access. The comments from readers are included alongside the article instead of being, as in a printed newspaper, part of a later edition or only published several days later and being set out alone without the originating debated text next to them (comments were very scarce in this case, and later the comments section was closed by the editors). There are also limitations to this media type as compared to a printed newspaper text. First, this article is relatively brief in terms of words (ca 1250),10 which could be part of CarbonBrief’s strategy to make their climate-related news both understandable and digestible. And despite the length of the article being limited, the number of hyperlinks makes it potentially much larger in size. Second, one downside of using hyperlinks is that the writer risks “losing” the reader as they make their way through the article if the reader follows one of the links and does not return to the originating article. Following this descriptive analysis of the intermedial aspects of the article, it is now possible to offer an interpretative answer to the question we posed initially: How do the two media products represent natural scientific research related to global warming, and how do these representations promote ecological agency? Regarding the representation of scientific research, we have demonstrated that the CarbonBrief article simplifies and condenses the underlying research to a level at which it can be understood by lay readers. This means that complicated terminologies and methodological discussions, large datasets (or thorough descriptions of them), discussions of research design and a stateof-the-art research overview cannot be found in the CarbonBrief article. The brevity of the article is, of course, the direct expression of this. The use of hypertext links helps to retain the brevity of the article while offering more in-depth material and further insights to interested readers. These links could provide a welcome possibility for readers with personal or professional reasons to be reading the article to pursue ideas from and references to further work. The article manages, in a short space, to refer to the fundamental method used in attribution science (as compared to climate science’s normal approach), which gives the reader a feeling that the sciences are not static but evolving, indeed progressing. The graphic style of the article (which is a typical intermedial phenomenon in itself since it considers the visual layout in relation to the text of the page) gives the article an appealing look that invites the reader to investigate and “participate in” the content. The use of visual material adds space and variation to the reading experience, which makes it more inviting. The creative use of images is part of this. The first photograph relates the article to experiences that many Europeans (and others) have had both in 2019 and beyond. It functions as a hook since it communicates a shared and intimate experience of

66

Chapter 3

extreme heat instead of remaining in an anecdotal mode or referring only to the isolated personal feeling of experiencing heat (which is the angle of many mainstream reports on heat waves). The article addresses a personal experience first, but then zooms out to make this individual approach a European one through the second and third images. This is also accomplished by how the three image sections not only illustrate the article but also narrate a microstory that relates a personal experience of first a weather phenomenon, then temperatures over time, and finally to longer timelapses, namely the climate. The images are part of the article’s attempt to represent a “readable” version of complicated research and to make this research accessible and engaging for nonspecialists. It is evident that the layout, the images, and the use of hyperlinks have the potential, and potential agency is all that our method can discuss, to create a sustained ecological agency in lay readers, at least compared to a traditional scientific article. The article mainly does so through its interactive capacities and how it engages the reader tactically, but perhaps even more so through the transformation of scientific jargon to an easily accessible popular writing style. In addition, both the photos’ ability to connect to individual experiences and the general graphical discourse of the climate crisis create points of identification that may transform into some instance of ecological agency. PART 2: CHARLOTTE WEITZE’S CLI-FI NOVEL DEN AFSKYELIGE (THE ABOMINABLE) Step 1 We begin with the presentation of the media product. Charlotte Weitze’s (b. 1974) 320-page novel Den afskyelige (The Abominable—not translated) is narrated by Heidi, a young nurse living in Scandinavia, probably Norway, in a relatively near future dominated by global warming. She tells the dramatic story of how she falls in love with a young man, Kenneth, who is apparently suffering from hyperhydrosis, which is abnormal sweat production. She describes in detail how the couple struggles, with mixed results, to live a CO2neutral life in a globally warmed and warming world. Later in the novel, the reader comes to understand, and so does Heidi, that her lover Kenneth is not suffering from a conventional medical condition. Instead, his diverse symptoms stem from the fact that he is actually a descendant of a Yeti, a cryptozoological mythical animal. She leaves Kenneth, despite being pregnant, but later miscarries. After a dramatic collapse of a huge dam toward the end of the book, she hides on a mountain, where she tries to save her best friend, Mette, and her baby. However, her friend drowns in the rising waters, and the book ends with her taking care of Mette’s baby, not knowing whether the

From Climate Science to Agency?

67

mountaintop on which they live is the only place on Earth where it is possible to live. This novel explicitly deals with global warming, but it does so in a very different way than the CarbonBrief article. The following analysis of the basic intermedial character of the novel will be supplemented by a comparison with the CarbonBrief article. Step 2 A brief elementary account of the medial setup of the novel is needed. Regarding the technical device of display, we read the work in a hardback printed book version. The book has a dustcover that combines verbal language and the dark profile of a looming animal figure, while also alluding to a mountain with a tiny house on top, which points to the end of the novel. The illustration on the dustcover is identical to the one on the hardback (designed by Alette Bertelsen). The dominating basic medium of the novel is written text, but the paratext of the novel—the cover and dustcover—includes visual representations (see figure 3.3). The basic material dimension of the novel is printed letters on paper pages. The spatiotemporal setup is similar to that of most narrative written literature: a sequential reading from beginning to end is strongly recommended, even though one can indeed read a novel from the end to the beginning or read parts of the book chosen at random. When turning the pages and holding the book, which includes a certain amount of the sense of touch, the most important sensorial aspect when reading a novel is, of course, the eyesight.11 Apart from the dustcover, the dominating semiotic modality of the novel is the symbolic sign function, typical of linguistic signs. There are qualifying and contextual dimensions of the book that place it solidly in the generic form of a novel. Apart from the fact that it consists of a written narrative with fictive characters in a recognizable, if not fully realistic setting, it even has the word “novel” (roman in Danish) on the cover and dustcover, and on the title page. Because it is an ecomedia product (meaning a media product that in some direct or indirect way deals with ecological issues), the entire novel can be said to be a media transformation of pre-existing ideas concerning the ecological crisis and global warming as they have been presented in a huge network of scientific, political, and popular scientific material. Weitze stresses this fact by including a relatively unusual but not unknown (for literary fiction) list of acknowledgments that includes thanking not only friends, colleagues, and funding institutions but also a number of experts in several fields. The author thus explicitly acknowledges that several aspects of the novel can be seen

68

Chapter 3

Figure 3.3  Cover illustration, Charlotte Weitze, Den afskyelige. Source: Alette Bertelsen/AletteB​.dk​.

From Climate Science to Agency?

69

as media transformations from the fields, among others, of climate science, engineering (concerning dams), and fanatical (religious) psychological states. From this media transformation perspective, it would be possible to analyze several specific scenes in the book, as well as the overall theme of the book, the intermedial interplay of medium specificity (the novelistic formal characteristics), and transmedial topics. In other words, to analyze which aspects of the form and content of the originating texts may be transformed (the transmedial aspects) and which aspects are only transported with greater difficulty (because of medium-specific constraints). Let us exemplify the dynamics of this media transformation. The detailed research results of science are hard to refer in the novel without the risk that the fictional contract is broken, or that the novel becomes a boring information container. But fictive characters, in this case Heidi’s parents when she was a child, have the task of explaining the albedo effect and its relation to climate change: – The world is absurd, dad said, – and human beings [mennesket] are absurd. – It is all so scary [uhyggeligt, literally: unheimlich], I said. – It is important to keep up hopes, dad said. – As long as there is cold, white ice in the world, there will be hope. The snow falling on the glacier remain in place, as opposed to the snow falling on the naked, dark cliffs. White surfaces are good. They reflect sunlight and push away the heat. The black stuff only supports global warming.12

Imitating the style and tone of a parent’s explanation to a child, it is clear that the fragment explains a scientific concept, and while succeeding, we may suppose, to explain it to the child, the grown-up reader may notice how the rather simple language is mixed with more formal phrases: either as a sign of the father not being able to wholly formulate his idea in “childish” terms—or as a sign that the author in reality explains a scientific notion to her reader. The same is the case a little later in the novel, when the father again has to explain more general scientific connections directly related to the family’s everyday life: I think I remember mum and dad looking at each other, for a long time. Mum nodded, and dad sighed. – We have talked about when to tell you, he said reluctantly, – but now you are big enough to be told. One of the big ocean streams, the Gulf Stream, has been changed. Climate is about to change. Dad told us that cars and airplanes pollute. That many of the things that he and mum bought were damaging to the environment. Most of the clothes, meat, and some of the exotic fruits. Even the electric light and the heating in the winter. All this produced an aerosol, CO2, that heated the world. That is why the ice caps were melting, that is why the sea levels rose, and that is why the Gulf Stream changed. Maybe this place, the dried out fjord, would one day turn into an ocean.”13

70

Chapter 3

Consequently, many of the central aspects of the novel, from the overall thematic content to many detailed discussions and particular scenes in the novel, could be analyzed as instances of media transformations from scientific material into scenes and conversations in the fictive setup of the novel. Regarding the heteromedial combination analysis, there are different paths to follow. It is interesting to analyze the ways in which the novel represents mass media products, and how mass media products stand against other media representations, and how this particular relation influences the protagonists.14 One could also investigate the way in which written notes and photographs from Heidi’s past are interpreted as signs of both a changing climate and the death of Heidi’s sister in an accident when Heidi was a child. These stand in stark contrast to the media products that Heidi and Kenneth produce together, including pornographic films to make money for their CO2-neutral life! These peculiar media practices may be discussed while also entering into what Stacy Alaimo has described as an independent, alternative (activists as well as alternative porn producers) way of engaging in the environmental debate.15 After this brief intermedial analysis of the novel, it is now possible to discuss the novel in view of the initial question: How do the two media products represent natural scientific research related to global warming, and how do these representations promote ecological agency? There are, of course, innumerable reasons why an author chooses to write a novel, including personal, economic, and social reasons, not to mention the psychologically soothing or calming effect of confronting difficult material.16 However, what we are specifically after here is to investigate how the novel represents elements of scientific research in a narrative and fictive form where it can be easier understood by nonspecialists. But this is, of course, only one aspect of the novel.17 Because the novel is fictional, the main strategy used for adapting or representing scientific material is to incorporate it into the standard aspects of narrative fiction. Here, it is done in two very typical ways. First, the entire storyworld of the imagined future world is informed by contemporary scientific theories and simulations concerning what the world will look like in a future destroyed by global warming. Second, many of the discussions involving the protagonists, particularly those that take place between them, relatively directly “translate” scientific material into actions, reflections, and direct conversations or discussions. One of the typical medial aspects of scientific discourse is the goal of producing a discursive style that expresses the (supposedly) objective character of scientific research. This is directly opposed by the strategy of the novel. To formulate this differently, everything in a novel must be seen or described from the perspective of a human

From Climate Science to Agency?

71

(or in very rare cases, nonhuman) being. In this case, the perspective is that of Heidi, who is the narrator of the novel. If the ideal of natural science is to produce knowledge that can (most often but not always) be repeated by way of controlled experiments carried out by other more or less anonymous researchers or by measurements taken by such researchers, a golden rule of fiction is to embody everything that happens through the mind and bodies of narrators and/or characters; in fiction there is no attempt at objectivity, at least not in the scientific sense of the word. From this, an answer to the second half of the research question, regarding ecological agency, follows. Weitze’s fiction, which entails partly imagined and partly scientifically grounded storyworlds, produces human figures who experience on and through their bodies and minds the conditions demonstrated in natural scientific articles. The aim of natural scientific media products is to predict possible and plausible future worlds, but in this case, the ambition of the fictional storyworlds is to concretize and embody scientific research in recognizable specific situations, including the effects of global warming. By doing so, the results that are produced in natural science become directly recognizable and understandable for readers who do not wish to or are unable to read scientific articles. The reader of Den afskyelige is helped to experience, via the fictional storyworlds, what life might feel like in the future. Charlotte Weitze offers scenarios that depict future life in the Anthropocene.

PART 3: INTERMEDIAL COMPARISON The comparison of the two texts aims to answer the research question, the first part of which has to do with how the two media products represent the scientific research results, which in both cases are important sources for the texts. Here, the most important difference is probably that the CarbonBrief text directly paraphrases, refers to, and quotes science, whereas the novel has a more indirect way of referring to the scientific research. In Weitze’s novel, science is constantly being put in the mouths of the protagonists, in direct conversations and discussions, and in general references such as “science says” or “new research demonstrates.” Another clear difference is that the CarbonBrief article, starting with actual weather phenomena, is particularly interested in making scientific predictions about the future. Weitze’s novel, on the other hand, is set in such a future, but it is a fictive future. The people inside the storyworld, however, do not experience the world as a future but as their present living conditions and surroundings. This means, and this more or less sums up the points about direct/indirect and future/present, that the popular science

72

Chapter 3

article, like science, aims at producing general notions about the ecological crisis and global warming. The novel, on the other hand, individualizes the scientific, generalized notions of the future risks inherent in the Anthropocene condition. We have chosen two media products in two qualified media types that are both successful in their aims, at least if the criteria for doing so are their abilities to represent science results and theories in their respective media forms. However, when comparing the communicative efficiency criteria and the aesthetic form and content criteria, it is clear that these can also be more critically evaluated regarding their scientific representation. The article could perhaps be criticized for taking an unproblematized Eurocentric view of the Anthropocene future. This, we should assume, has to do with the fact that although UK-based CarbonBrief has a good European and global outlook, it nevertheless functions in a distinct UK context, which explains the choice of using a photo taken in London and two maps of Europe (as opposed to more global options). It would be unfair to criticize the novel for representing a limited, Eurocentric aspect of the global effects of the Anthropocene condition, simply because that is what novels basically do: represent a storyworld from a situated position—even if this position is “global”, non-national, like the case of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future, or non-existing, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.18 From a medium-specific perspective, a contemporary mainstream realistic novel by default anchors its plot and characters in time and space. Generally, the raison d’être of such modern mainstream fiction is to not speak in generalities (as was the case in medieval Christian allegories or myths) but, on the contrary, to demonstrate how general social or scientific rules work on a human scale in the concrete lives of individuals or individuals as part of social groups. Therefore, if one wanted to criticize the novel, it should be on aesthetic grounds instead. A well-known aesthetic ideal is that when science (or philosophy, or other external forms) “enters” art, it should preferably do so in ways where science is introduced in the artistic universe in necessary, elegant, or inconspicuous ways.19 This is not always the case in Den afskyelige, where some conversations (or individual utterances in dialogues) are sometimes read as almost direct quotes from newspapers or scientific journals without this being properly incorporated in the novelistic form as natural, spoken language uttered in a conversation between two human beings. In these instances, the science is shoehorned into the fiction: the author’s comprehensive research enters the novel as research rather than as an aesthetically motivated and transformed form and content. It is of course impossible to completely keep apart the first half of the research question (representation of science) from the second half, which has to do with how the two media products employ strategies that make science

From Climate Science to Agency?

73

directly related to the everyday experiences of nonexperts in climate science. But let us try to focus more on ecological agency. Communication, per definition, relates to not only producers but also the receivers of the communicative activity. Therefore we took as a starting point earlier, that one of the major targets for both popular science commu­nication and a mainstream novel focused on climate change is to transfer aspects of climate science results from hardcore science environments into new domains. This also, to a certain extent, relates the scientific ideas to everyday experiences and ecological agency, and both the article and the novel obviously attempt to do this. Global warming, and most of the other effects of the ecologically critical situation, is, as implied by its name, global in scope, and this is undoubtedly one of the reasons why relating these issues to specific, personal experience is not always an easy task. We have chosen these two media products because they exemplify successful attempts at correlating the discourse of the ecological crisis with individual matters, and that is also why our research does not ask if they do it but how they do it. The article’s approach to this, as mentioned previously, is to base the global condition in a local phenomenon: the specific heat waves described in the text and represented by a photograph are used as signs of a global warming tendency. So the heat wave, which many people in Europe would have a fresh memory of, is depicted as not only problematic for one person (the person in the photo) but also for many others who can easily identify with him. So the man in the photograph and the maps are anonymized: the intended effect of this is that, in principle, anybody will be able to identify with the man and the areas on the map. The goal of the article is to make a general point, most of all on a cognitive level: for all we know, the man might be an actor, and the maps are extremely unspecific. The novel’s strategy is distinctly different from that of the CarbonBrief article. The novel offers ways, quite directly, if still in fictive terms, to communicate what life might be like in a warmer world, not in general terms but by way of identifying with specific persons with names, a fictional background, bodies, families, and jobs. Presumably, the intention of the author is to create a concretized, specific description of the future world in order to effectually make readers understand how it feels (in both the psychological and the sensorial sense of the word) to live in such an Anthropocene future. And to try and act now, in the present, to avoid that the world will turn into this dystopian vision, of course. The pattern from the answers to the first half of the research question returns here. It is a question about the generality of science versus the specificity of arts and literature, and the aim of artistic media products, which are to produce ecological agency by way of individual, specifically situated examples.

74

Chapter 3

CONCLUDING REMARKS In the two case study examples we have selected for this chapter, we have not identified obvious differences in terms of the “success” of representing the two issues that are in focus. What the method used for comparison can detect is some relative but not very dramatic advantages accomplished by the science journalist Daisy Dunne and the fiction writer Charlotte Weitze, which are largely dictated by the “weak” medium-specific affordances of the qualified media they operate in. It is evident that both Dunne and Weitze have worked intensively to incorporate natural scientific research in their texts. The main difference between them is that the article tries to refer as directly and unambiguously as possible to ongoing scientific research and scientific sources, whereas the novel transfers scientific research from direct references into either a general construction of a future, fictional world dominated by global warming or words that are spoken by the protagonists when they are discussing how to live in such a world. From a superficial point of view, the popular scientific article perhaps could be thought of as much better suited to doing this, but Weitze manages to include quite a lot of scientific material in her novel, for instance in the two conversations that we quoted (as is also clear from her acknowledgment of numerous scientific expert sources at the end of the novel). When it comes to relating the science to everyday experiences and possible ecological agency (the second half of the research question), the novel, following conventional wisdom, probably “ought” to be best at doing so. Because a novelist, generally, is working with fictional characters in recognizable but fictional surroundings, it should be easy for novelists to make science matter to nonscientists. Weitze does not fail at this task, but even the journalist Dunne shrewdly uses the available medium-specific means of the online popular science article to construct a minor narrative consisting of a man in the not-forgotten local heat wave of 2019 in London that circled outwards to a European climate condition that was easy for many readers to identify with. Banalizing our subject a little bit, we conclude that it is a draw between Weitze’s surreal cli-fi novel and Dunne’s narratively ordered popular science article. Even if this competition ends with a draw, to use an inappropriate metaphor,20 we hope we have shown the productivity of intermedial ecocriticism. We need tools to analyze and discuss the scientific results regarding our epoch’s most alarming topics, and even if we in the humanities cannot conduct the natural scientific research ourselves, we can still contribute to the thinking about the ecological crisis in crucial ways. In particular, we can do so by investigating some of the different media products in the different media types that do the hard work of transporting scientific material across

From Climate Science to Agency?

75

media borders to a place where most people can learn about what the sciences are saying about our planetary future.

NOTES 1. Daisy Dunne, “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely’,” CarbonBrief, August 2, 2019, https://www​.carbonbrief​.org​/climate​-change​-made​-europes​-2019​-record​-heatwave​-up​-to​-hundred​-times​ -more​-likely/. 2. The tweet can be accessed here: Met Office, Twitter Post, July 29, 2019, https://twitter​.com​/metoffice​/status​/1155870373310849024. 3. See for instance Peter A Stott et al., “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate-related Events,” WIRE’s Climate Change 7, no. 1 (2016): 23–41, https:// doi​.org​/10​.1002​/wcc​.380; and for a more general introduction from an international research group developing this approach, see the website World Weather Attribution, https://www​.wor​ldwe​athe​ratt​ribution​.org/. 4. For a discussion of the history and function of hypertext in news and outside news, see Luuk Lagerwerf and Daniël Verheij, “Hypertext in Online News Stories: More Control, More Appreciation,” Information Design Journal 21, no. 2 (December 2014): 164–177, https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/idj​.21​.2​.07lag. 5. For a history and discussion of the footnote as one of the crucial backbones of academic writing, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London: Faber, 1997). 6. Terry W. Burns, John O’Connor, and Susan M. Stocklmayer, “Science Communcation: A Contemporary Definition,” Public Understanding of Science 12, no. 2 (2003): 183–202, https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/09636625030122004. 7. Ibid., 190. In a useful discussion leading to an attempt to define science communication, Burns, O’Connor, and Stocklmayer suggest an AEIOU-list of the goals of science communication: science communication aims to reach the following “personal responses” to the communicative efforts: “awareness,” “enjoyment,” “interest,” “opinions,” and “understanding.” 8. The brief article can be accessed here: “Human Contribution to the Recordbreaking July 2019 Heat Wave in Western Europe,” World Weather Attribution, August 2, 2019, https://www​.wor​ldwe​athe​ratt​ribution​.org​/human​-contribution​-to​-the​ -record​-breaking​-july​-2019​-heat​-wave​-in​-western​-europe/; whereas the actual article, Robert Vautard et al., “Human Contribution to the Record-breaking July 2019 Heat Wave in Western Europe,” is here: https://www​.wor​ldwe​athe​ratt​ribution​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/July2019heatwave​.pdf. 9. In the case of this particular article, at the time of writing (August 10, 2022, three years after the publication of the text), only two comments appear online in response to the text: both are critical of the content of the article. 10. As compared to a top story on CarbonBrief, Ayesha Tandon and Roz Pidcock, “Polar Bears and Climate Change: What Does the Science Say?” CarbonBrief,

76

Chapter 3

December 8, 2022, https://interactive​.carbonbrief​.org​/polar​-bears​-climate​-change​ -what​-does​-science​-say/– which is circa the double size of the article we discuss here. CarbonBrief also do long reads, especially around COP and IPCC reports. One of the most popular articles was in November 2022 about COP: Aruna Chandrasekhar et al., “COP27: Key Outcomes Agreed at the UN Climate Talks in Sharm el-Sheikh,” CarbonBrief, November 21, 2022, https://www​.carbonbrief​.org​/cop27​-key​-outcomes​ -agreed​-at​-the​-un​-climate​-talks​-in​-sharm​-el​-sheikh/, which runs over 24000 words, including lots of image captions, tweets. Thanks to Péter Kristóf Makai for mentioning this. 11. Reading, even so-called silent reading, has possible auditory elements, but of course, less so than the visual experience. See Niklas Salmose, “Sensorial Aesthetics: Cross-Modal Stylistics in Modernist Fiction,” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 10 (November 2020): 321–335, https://doi​.org​/10​.18778​/2083​ -2931​.10​.18. 12. Charlotte Weitze, Den afskyelige (Copenhagen: Samleren, 2016), 16. Our English translation. 13. Ibid., 32–33. 14. An analytical strategy developed in Bruhn, Intermediality. 15. Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 16. In a recent collection of essays on artistic practice in the face of the ecological crisis, Weitze offers a number of interesting reflections concerning artistic ways to react to the ecological crisis. Charlotte Weitze, Klimaet og kunstneren (Sorø: U Press, 2022). 17. Other interesting aspects of the novel include its mixture of magical realism and cli-fi, the mild but recognizable satire of the Scandinavian welfare state as well as the novel’s elegant discussion of gender issues. 18. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (London: Orbit, 2020); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Penguin Books, 2016). 19. But this aesthetic criterium of course changes somewhat from traditional highbrow literature to other, more “popular” genres like sci-fi – or in the cases where “unusual” fact-related material is incorporated in original and artistically innovative ways, like in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte Vom Franz Biberkopf (Frankfurt Am Main: S. Fischer, 2008); Or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2014). 20. Such “competitions” are criticized in Heather Houser, Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

Chapter 4

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

In this chapter, we will discuss one of the most serious and most debated elements of the current planetary ecological crisis, namely climate change. We have chosen two media products from two very diverse media types. On their own, and even more so when considered together, they exemplify important questions that we need to understand better. We will describe and analyze what is probably the largest collective contemporary (and historical) scientific achievement, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from 2021. This report is often considered to be a beacon of modern natural scientific organization and achievement, and we will compare it with a graphic novel by French writer Philippe Squarzoni. It will be clear by the end of this chapter that both of these media products give the impression that their authors are extremely aware of the importance of mediating science in a reliable but also understandable way— but they employ two very different strategies for achieving what we will call a truthful mediation of climate change science. They do this by confronting, in different ways, the question of the necessary but communicatively troubling fact of scientific uncertainty. Uncertainty in climate science can be briefly defined as follows: In contrast to ‘certainty’, a stasis in which facts are settled, ‘uncertainty’ describes the awareness that the understanding of something is incomplete. While mathematical models are very precise in assigning certainty, ordinary language remains very ambiguous and ill-equipped to communicate likelihoods and certainties. This poses a great challenge in understanding and speaking about the risks of climate change.1

77

78

Chapter 4

We will present one of the important theoretical backgrounds for this chapter, namely an intermedial understanding of truthfulness, and then we will follow our three-step intermedial ecocritical model: in the first step, we describe our chosen material and define the research topic, and in step 2, we provide an intermedial description of the two media products. In the third and final step, we conduct intermedial interpretation and comparison.

THE TRUTH CLAIMS OF MEDIA A basic feature of media is that they give us access to what we do not know from our own direct experience.2 According to John Durham Peters, media is “a means by which experience is supplied to others who lack the original.”3 But to obtain experience from media products, we must somehow be able to trust the people or institutions involved in their production, and therefore most media types are framed by a set of gatekeeping procedures that assert a media product’s credibility. A published scientific report, for instance, is based on a very elaborate infrastructure involving, among other things, the relevant evaluation and critique of the findings of the study produced by the authors, peer reviews by international scholars, and the editing and managerial work of editors and other academic institutions. This is just one example of how every media product that we encounter contains an implicit warranty confirming that several acts and procedures have been carried out that guarantee that we can have faith in what is communicated. This means that the truth claims of media relate to our tacit knowledge about the production process. A photo of someone, for example, is an indexical sign that they were at the specific place where the photo was taken (figure 4.1). This is based on the material setup of analogue photography: a person has opened a camera’s lens and thus let light in and made an imprint on camera film that can be developed and turned into a photo later on. One of the most important truth claims of photography is that “someone was there” so something could be captured by the camera. The problem, though, is that a photoshopped or deep fake image can, of course, make this claim too, and the history of photography has therefore constantly been haunted by the risk that its truthfulness can be undermined. Hence, a crucial yet utterly unsurprising lesson is that the general truth claims of a qualified media type are not a guarantee that each and every media product of that particular type is truthful. Different media types are, in very general terms, associated with different kinds of truth claims (in Elleström’s terms, the historical, operational, aesthetical, etc. aspects of the medium). We ascribe greater scientific credibility to an academic research article than to a four-stanza poem when it comes to considering information about the structure of the chemical design of a

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

79

Figure 4.1  The Blue Marble—the most redistributed image of the earth—marks a shift in the ways we perceive and relate to the planet. Also, it is a testament of the indexical power of photography — humanity went to space. Source: NASA/ Lunar and Planetary Institute, Regional Planetary Image Facility. Apollo Image Status, AS17-148-22727. http:// www​.lpi​.usra​.edu​/resources​/apollo​/frame/​?AS17​-148​-22727.

polymer, for example, just as we would trust a report from the BBC more than an avant-garde theatre performance if we are aiming to get an accurate weather report. On the other hand, we do not expect any deeper revelations about the human condition in the daily weather forecast, which is often what we look for in art. We have this attitude because it is part of the contract we have with these types of media and their qualifying aspects. To be a little bit more specific, we argue that it is specific media characteristics that convey certain truth claims and that they contribute to when and how we perceive communication to be truthful. It is the produced truth claims of media that create a perception of truthfulness in a viewer or a reader. When we say something is “true,” this is in fact a shortcut for saying, “I perceive this as being a truthful representation of something else,” and thereby we tend to accept the truth claims conveyed by the media product (and, behind that, some supposed producer of the media product). Transferring scientific results from a huge scientific report to a shorter summary or to a more fictively based graphic novel raises some specific challenges that have to do with the basic affordances of media transformation. From an abstract point of view, it is clearly comparable but not identical to

80

Chapter 4

the most scrutinized and popular area of media transformation, namely novel to film adaptations, which is something that the academic field of film adaptation studies examines: it studies, for instance, how various aspects of a Jane Austen novel are transmediated into a film. However, and as mentioned in our introduction, in the field of film adaptation studies, and in popular discourses about books turned into films, the concept of “fidelity” is seldom productive because, when we see a film adaptation, part of the pleasure “comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.”4 Basically, it would be too boring to watch an adaptation that is too faithful, and it is impossible to transmit content and form without losing certain elements or making changes anyway.5 This is different regarding media transformations, in which truthfulness to external perception is central: we don’t want the news journalist reporting from a war zone or witnesses giving evidence in court to be too “creative”; we are expecting them to relate what happened rather than to tell a good story. Here, fidelity to a source is less problematic, and sometimes it is indeed the crucial point. Let us see what this notion of truthfulness may help us understand in the following analyses.

STEP 1: PRESENTATION OF MATERIAL AND DEFINITION OF RESEARCH QUESTION Summary for Policymakers What is climate change? Or should we ask what is global warming, or global heating, or the greenhouse effect?6 The apparently simple question, regardless of which particular word you prefer, explodes into a plethora of different and internally divergent perspectives depending on which approach you want to pursue: the question may be answered epistemologically, existentially, ethically, politically, geographically, geologically, historically, or indeed from many other angles. Most of the terminological options, though, rely on a natural scientific grounding—a constellation of scientific findings that, together, can be labeled using some of the perspectives just mentioned. Since the late 1980s, the most important scientific explanations for the changing planetary climate conditions have been provided by what is often referred to as the IPCC, that is, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPPC) website provides a somewhat longer but more accurate description of the organization: “The United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.” The website also declares that “[t]he IPCC was created to provide policymakers with regular scientific

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

81

assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options.”7 As described in Howe and Cronon’s 2014 historical overview of the intricate relations between climate science and politics, the IPCC was, despite the grim prospect of global warming, founded in rather optimistic spirits in the 1980s for the simple reason that two other global ecological threats had recently been diagnosed as risks, resolutely met, and therefore avoided: the risks connected to so-called acid rain and the danger of destroying the ozone layer. Both risks had been fought successfully by collective global efforts, and there was a hope that climate change could be fought just as effectively. The problem of global warming, however, has proved to be on another level of complexity and magnitude, and the results of attempting to combat it have never been anywhere near as successful as in the case of the two other issues. The institutional innovation of the IPCC, as the name suggests, is that it is constructed as an intergovernmental institution, that is, it is based on governmental decisions (as opposed to, for instance, decisions of scientific associations or other comparable entities). The idea behind the IPCC was to produce science-based material that would not only inform policymakers but also be binding for the involved partners (again, on the governmental level). But history has shown that the relatively idealistic idea of top-down, science-based knowledge is impossible to push through in real life.8 The IPCC as it is constructed today includes hundreds of top-tier scientists from universities and research institutions worldwide who specialize in many different climate-related fields, but the administration also follows principles of global representation and realpolitik (realist politics), for better or for worse. It is these huge groups of scientists that produce the reports, which are divided into areas like basic science, mitigation and adaptation, future scenarios, and threats. Since the first published report in 1990, the IPCC has published its results in recurrent cycles, and the most recent report from August 2021 opens the sixth cycle. The extremely time-consuming and demanding assessment work behind the reports is executed by thousands of scientists worldwide who conduct thorough peer reviews of the available scientific material on climate change that has been published through acknowledged channels. For the 2021 report, 14,000 research articles were scrutinized according to the highest scientific standards before the results were collected, evaluated, compared, and, finally, summarized in different reports. It is important to note that the IPCC does not conduct or produce research on data; instead, the panel’s reports assess and then communicate existing research. The IPCC reports are not uncontroversial, of course. Skepticism and denial concerning the science about human-induced global warming have existed and been politically and economically supported for decades.9 But even those who do not deny that climate change exists

82

Chapter 4

criticize aspects of the IPCC, in particular the Summary for Policymakers (from now on referred to as SPM), that we will discuss later. Whereas the main report, which is more than 3000 pages long, is generally considered to express the results of painstakingly peer-reviewed science, the summary is a political document that has to be approved by all political partners, which is why it is considered to be an unnecessarily watered down and depoliticized document that avoids all geopolitical issues that contradict the interests of the signatories of the report; for example, Saudi Arabia has to approve the final content of the report, as well as countries like Sweden or Denmark. Therefore, even if the legitimacy of the IPCC is accepted relatively broadly on a global level because of the solidity and scientific reliability of its assessments, the IPCC does not avoid coming up against serious political issues; this factor is not at the center of our analysis, though. But it does lead us to ask why we don’t see dramatic action that mirrors the dramatic conclusions of the unanimous research results produced by the largest collective scientific effort in world history, and why don’t business leaders, politicians, and individual citizens react by radically changing course? At least two answers seem relevant. First, as Howe has convincingly demonstrated and the debate on the SPM has clarified, climate science, like all science, is necessarily part of political, ideological, economic, and historical contexts. Because of their very definition, these contexts result in complex relations between raw data points, scientific descriptions, public dissemination, and the implementation of science in society. As discussed in our introductory chapter, knowledge and power are deeply interrelated, and science is not produced or disseminated in a vacuum. This discussion, traditionally, is the area addressed by historians of science or social scientists (see also Sundqvist 2021). Second, it has to do with the huge issue of communicating science in a truthful way (how to do so is one of the core questions of this book) that also somehow confronts the question of scientific uncertainty, which we will discuss in this chapter. And even though there are crucial political aspects to the communication of science, as has been dramatically clear in the case of the relation between basic science and the SPM in the IPCC material, we will focus on matters of communication in this. Let us begin the investigation with a quote that connects science, mediation, and the IPCC: Melissa Gomis, a senior science officer at the IPCC, coordinated the graphics effort [of the SPM], which included consultation with cognitive experts and user tests with policymakers to consolidate the main messages of the report into visual form. She told Inside Climate News that showing the report’s findings

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

83

through graphics can “really help visualize . . . what is not perceivable out of raw data or out of your window”.10

Gomis identifies one of the most common observations concerning climate science communication: that climate change, along with other ecological problems, tends to be something that is hard to grasp and hard to describe. We don’t necessarily “see” climate change by looking “out of your window.” And it is impossible to communicate the “raw data,”because it is not efficient to use raw data in communication strategies. Offering “raw data” in the form of more and more information to the public is a well-known unsuccessful communication strategy known as the “information deficit” method. This is why, Gomis says, research has to be changed into a “visual form”—we would say that science must be mediated to be effectively communicated and to achieve some kind of ecological agency.11 Finally, the quote discloses the professional and well-organized communication apparatus that works behind the scenes of the final IPCC material that is offered to the public. There is a “coordinator” of the graphics work, and the insights of “consultations with cognitive experts” have been mixed with user tests. In other words, communicative efforts are a crucial part of the desired effects of science, and this is exactly why intermedial studies, which focuses on the complex phenomenon of communication, may be an important tool to better understand science communication. It is not realistic to expect nonexpert readers to read the 3900-page full report, and for the majority of journalists, citizens, and other decision-makers, the forty-two pages that pedagogically summarize the SPM are the more relevant source of information about the panel’s work. We will therefore analyze this document, despite the political objections and misgivings surrounding this popularized report. Squarzoni’s Saison brune We compare the SPM with a graphic novel, Saison brune, which is the second media product considered in this chapter. If we trust the autobiographical narrative of this novel, we must believe that its creator, Philippe Squarzoni, born in France in 1971, did not know much about climate change when he began researching the question of environmental politics or environmental science. When he wrapped up the final part of his book on French neoliberal politics and its devastating consequences, he had to do some research on ecological issues. But what should have been just one section of his book turned into six years of hard work trying to understand the history and consequences of climate change and possible solutions to it. The acclaimed comic book writer has created works dealing with several charged political subject matters, from the war in the Balkans to the Zapatista movement in Mexico. His comic books fall into the category of documentary

84

Chapter 4

comics, Sachcomics (German for nonfiction comics), and are also examples of “autobiographischen Comic.”12 Ann Gardiner notes that the book has received several prestigious prizes and that this prestige is even mirrored in the production design for the original French version (with the softcover with flaps, signifying a certain level of cultural status as opposed to, for instance, the popular Asterix series published in hardback). 13 In terms of style, Squarzoni’s black-and-white comics, including Saison brune, are relatively conventional; he seldom breaks the unwritten rules of comics, but the “serious” approach allows for one of the most important elements of Saison brune, namely the metafictional aspects. These aspects of the novel have to do with reflections on how to begin and end a story—in particular when it involves a “hyperobject”14— or how to deal with a wicked problem like climate change that is difficult to understand and therefore benefits from being given an artistic form. Saison brune tells the autobiographical story of the comics writer Philippe Squarzoni, who is about to finish his work on French politics and then, by coincidence, becomes interested in understanding the basics of climate change. The book describes his research, the results of his study, and how it affects his personal life. Whereas the original French title, Saison brune, refers to the fifth season between autumn and winter, the translated English title elegantly covers the autobiographical aspect of the book, Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science.15 In summary, we have a constellation of two media products that both deal with the issue of how to represent the idea of climate change: on the one hand, we have a scientific UN report that is aimed at a relatively broad, general public, and on the other hand, we have a graphic novel that is also meant for nonspecialist readers. The IPCC’s SPM report was published in 2021 and the graphic novel was published in 2012, and whereas the IPCC report would normally be described as belonging to a nonfictive and non-narrative factual format, or genre, the graphic novel includes both fictive and narrative aspects. Our main interest in this chapter is not to investigate the actual dissemination and use by concrete individuals or policymakers of the IPCC report as opposed to the comic book. Nor are we suggesting that the two texts are directly connected (the 2021 IPCC report does not build upon insights provided by the 2012 comic book), but they both communicate aspects of the climate crisis and they both deal with the question of uncertainty. Instead, we focus on how the two texts display a particular form of truthfulness that directly or indirectly confronts the problematic notion of uncertainty, as we defined it above—“‘uncertainty’ describes the awareness that the understanding of something is incomplete.” We do not focus on the inherent “incompleteness” and thus uncertainty of science in general, nor do we analyze specific recipients’ approaches to uncertainty. We want to understand

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

85

better how the two media products navigate the dialectic of truthfulness and uncertainty as communicative problems.

STEP 2: INTERMEDIAL DESCRIPTION OF THE TWO TEXTS We access the forty-two pages of the SPM via an internet browser on a desktop computer; the computer’s screen and navigating instruments are thus the technical device of display. In basic media terms, the report consists of written language and several visual diagrams and other illustrations that aim to clarify, among other things, the timeframes and geographical distribution of the effects of climate change. The material modality of the report, when accessed on a computer screen, is the two-dimensional screen’s interface images. The spatiotemporal modality is manifest in the sequential numbering of the forty-two pages; the report can potentially be read in a different sequence or sequences, but the typical reader probably doesn’t do so. The dominant sensorial modality is vision: the readers look at the pages—and there is no sound. There is an element of physical interaction when pressing keys or moving a cursor to navigate digitally in the report, but this is limited. The three Peircean semiotic relations are all activated; the reader understands the report through the symbolic letters of the words and combines this with an iconic interpretation of the colored illustrations. The indexical relation is present too, in the sense that all the data lying behind the scientific discussions are seen as real traces, real connections, from an outside world, the world whose climate is changing. Squarzoni’s voluminous graphic novel consists of 435 pages. The technical device of display we analyze here is the printed book version that has been translated into English. The book contains a number of different basic media, most importantly drawn images, but also reproduced photographs, text (in modified speech bubbles and in information texts), and diagrams. Regarding the four modalities, the material modality of a printed graphic novel is the printed paper pages, and the sensorial modality is mainly sight, but a certain tactile quality is in play too. In terms of the spatiotemporal modality, the graphic novel is characterized by a relatively strict sequentiality (even though you may want to move back and forth from time to time), and in terms of the semiotic modality, all three semiotic sign functions are present: the reader of the graphic novel is meant to decode the often complex word-image constellations by seeing the drawings and words both symbolically and iconically (as symbolic words and images resembling the world). But even the indexical decoding is present, both in the autobiographical aspect (the writing tracing the fact that the author has lived) and in the representation of science, where

86

Chapter 4

data to a certain extent can be described as traces of information that awaits a description, a context, and an interpretation. Summing up the intermedial description, we can conclude that the report and the graphic novel resemble each other: the two climate-related texts combine visual and textual elements in an ordered sequential form, basically perceived by vision—and they both represent fundamental scientific aspects of climate change but partly social aspects of it too. There are also, however, significant dissimilarities, and a more thorough analysis must be done to understand the representational differences in the two media products. STEP 3: INTERPRETATION AND COMPARISON We will now discuss how the two media products, each in their own way, produce effects of truthfulness in their communication of the uncertainties of climate science. Summary for Policymakers Let us begin with the SPM. Given the enormous size and complexity of the scientific endeavor of the IPCC organization (its importance for future human cultural development and even for humans’ survival), it will come as no surprise that there is an organized and professionalized apparatus that backs up and supports the communication strategy of all the material that the IPCC and researchers related to the IPCC are recommended to use. These communicative considerations materialize in several documents and reports, and two of these are particularly interesting. The rather strict “Visual Identity Guidelines” document is a systematic twenty-seven-page paper that accurately defines the visual choices for the IPCC material and mainly relies on research-based recommendations produced at the British Tyndall Center for Climate Research in 2017, which is acknowledged as a source.16 Another paper is the twenty-eight-page Principles for Effective Communication and Public Engagement on Climate Change: Handbook for IPCC Authors that, published in 2018, offers six succinct hands-on principles: “Be a confident communicator,” “Talk about the real world, not abstract laws,” “Connect with what matters to your audience,” “Tell a human story,” “Lead with what you know,” and finally “Use the most efficient visual communication.”17 The advice given in this handbook, which is based on thorough theoretical and empirical communication research, no doubt resembles strategies developed for almost all fields dealing with science communication. In this chapter, we argue that such communicative advice, and the way it can be compared to both an IPCC report and an aesthetic graphic novel, may be understood

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

87

productively by relating the media products to the notion of truthfulness and the avoidance of uncertainty, as discussed earlier. The SPM is a scientific report, and therefore it comes as no surprise that letters and numbers in quantitative terms dominate the text. When it comes to written language, the readability is improved by avoiding long chunks of text and by having colored numbers for the sequential numbers of the subsections—this all creates clarity and avoids confusion. The logical systematization of having subparts with numbers and letters simplifies the overview and navigation, and almost all of the descriptive text entities in the report are between four and eight lines long. Figure 4.2 shows an example of a typical page of the report. Given that the SPM is not meant for specialists but for a relatively general readership, the intermedial constellation of different media types in the work can be characterized as sober and restrained. It is worth noting that the report has no photographs, and there is no imagery that in any way represents the human body. This choice goes against some of the visual advice given to IPCC communicators: the recommendation was to use images from the image bank, which often, but not always, includes images of human figures in different environments—it was thought that this type of visual material attracts readers’ interest. However, the report has a number of visualizations that—if one can judge from the general reception of the report when it came out—are considered innovative and clarifying and, as such, follow the intentions of the manuals

Figure 4.2  An example of a typical page in the IPCC Report. Source: IPCC, “2021: Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press), 8, https://www​ .ipcc​.ch​/report​/ar6​/wg1​/downloads​/report​/IPCC​_AR6​_WGI​_SPM​.pdf.

88

Chapter 4

mentioned earlier, namely to make it easier for nonprofessionals to understand the very complex material (see figure 4.3). From an intermedial point of view, the visualizations may be characterized as a media transformation of (1) collected scientific data as summarized in numbers and graphs in the basic science report; and (2) the description of these in verbal language. It is generally thought that visual communication can be used to clarify the communication of complex material. The visualizations have three functions: they offer visualizations of temporal relations, they present visualizations of spatial relations, and they act as an aid for understanding scale (see figures 4.4, 4.5, 4.6). There is no immediate risk that these textual and visual choices may produce uncertainty; the media transformation from the immense and assessed scientific material into a very limited number of diagrams and visualizations involves challenges of a more practical nature (what to pick out). The transformation also involves the general risks, or rather rules, inherent in all media transformations, namely that of a shift in media type, because its very

Figure 4.3  Visualizations that facilitate the understanding of complex scientific ­material. Source: Figure 3 in SPM, “Synthesis of assessed observed and attributable regional change.” IPCC, SPM, 10-11.

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

89

Figure 4.4  Temporal visualizations. Source: Figure 1 in SPM, “History of global temperature change and causes of recent warming.” IPCC, SPM, 6.

Figure 4.5  Spatial visualizations. Source: Figure 5 in SPM, “Changes in annual mean surface temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture.” IPCC, SPM, 16.

90

Chapter 4

Figure 4.6  Visualizations of scales and proportions. Source: Figure 7 in SPM, “Cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions taken up by land and ocean sinks by 2100 under the five illustrative scenarios.” IPCC, SPM, 20.

definition involves a shift in content and form. But there is no doubt that the authors of the report are eager to communicate as clearly as possible without compromising the scientific quality of the information, even though they are addressing a lay audience. This process, in many ways, becomes a question of how to minimize uncertainty. It is well known that the question about scientific uncertainty has been an Achilles’ heel for climate science in general and perhaps for climate science communication in particular.18 Two factors have been problematic when climate science has been used to try to demonstrate the serious threats posed by global warming: the distinction between the weather and the climate (which we discussed briefly in chapter 3 in relation to the CarbonBrief article on attribution science) and, second, how difficult it is to communicate uncertainty. Because the temperature has changed slowly and most laypeople, until recently, have not been particularly aware of the small changes in temperature, it is notoriously difficult to relate to longer climate changes (defined as thirty-year cycles). This factor has been used by climate science deniers to convince people that the climate is not changing due to human influence, but it has also led to the public not taking the warnings seriously. The second problem is related to the question of the weather/climate: whereas the weather/climate question is not explicitly mentioned in the

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

91

SPM,19 the question of scientific certainty is explicitly and elaborately developed and implemented in all IPCC contexts. The reason for this, of course, is that scientists and the institution of the IPCC have to secure their scientific credibility, which is their main asset. To state the issue briefly, the problem is that no science works with 100 percent certainty—but this does not endanger the reliability of science. This is not a contradiction at all, but rather an inherent feature of all science in the Western tradition, and this was referred to in the introduction to this book. We showed that Garrard, Haraway, and Zapf all work with understandings of science that recognize the immense worth of the natural sciences without being duped into blindly trusting the same sciences. The uncertainty aspects of science are not considered a major issue in the relevant academic disciplines; on the contrary, the fact that scientific results and the scientific process, by their very definitions, include elements of uncertainty is considered a basic, inherent condition for conducting science. But this does not mean that it is not a communicative problem, because admitting uncertainty has potentially dire consequences regarding questions of individual agency and collective policies. The problem of communicating uncertainty is thus not only that the media transformations take place when a data point, or a constellation of data points, moves further and further from the originating data, but also step by step during these media transformations (which is a process that Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been very interested in mapping). We also have to deal with the final step, so to speak, which is when data turned into scientific results should be communicated. This is also an intermedial question in this instance, because it has to do with translating mathematical probabilities and extremely complex calculations into language. So a “classic” media transformation from the representational basic media system of mathematics and numbers to the basic media form of language is used in a communicative media type like the SPM. This system is referred to explicitly in the brief foreword of the report: “Based on scientific understanding, key findings can be formulated as statements of fact or associated with an assessed level of confidence indicated using the IPCC calibrated language.”20 There is a reference to a note that we refer to here in full: Each finding is grounded in an evaluation of underlying evidence and agreement. A level of confidence is expressed using five qualifiers: very low, low, medium, high and very high, and typeset in italics, for example, medium confidence. The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result: virtually certain 99–100% probability, very likely 90–100%, likely 66–100%, about as likely as not 33–66%, unlikely 0–33%, very unlikely 0–10%, exceptionally unlikely 0–1%. Additional terms (extremely

92

Chapter 4

likely 95–100%, more likely than not >50–100%, and extremely unlikely 0–5%) may also be used when appropriate. Assessed likelihood is typeset in italics, for example, very likely. This is consistent with AR5 [the IPCC report before this one]. In this Report, unless stated otherwise, square brackets [x to y] are used to provide the assessed very likely range, or 90% interval.21

This is what is at stake in the entire report, where we see quotes like the following: “B.5.1 Past GHG emissions since 1750 have committed the global ocean to future warming (high confidence).”22 Or B.2.4 It is very likely that heavy precipitation events will intensify and become more frequent in most regions with additional global warming. At the global scale, extreme daily precipitation events are projected to intensify by about 7% for each 1°C of global warming (high confidence).23

It is evident that the graphic meaning-making of the linguistic material in the report has a strict systematicity: the text is hierarchically ordered in headlines, subheadlines, and different levels, and the reader is also supported by the different layers being in different colors. But, to sum up, the most important communicative choice of the report is letting the visual language offer easy-to-grasp overviews and relatively accurate visual renderings of, to use an everyday phrase, the “big picture”: the really heavy scientific lifting, though, is done in the written text parts of the report. Here, all approximations and all other imprecise language that may lead to an unwanted focus on “uncertainty” is avoided, most significantly and clearly in the media transformation of content from the mathematical data sets into exact formulations of probability because this is codified in verbal uncertainty terms. Another way to put this is that the report allows a limited level of uncertainty to be present in the visualization of the data, but the textual layers of the text are controlled much more strictly. Arguably, therefore, it seems as if the people who wrote the report, and their communication advisors, consider the visualizations to be a kind of aesthetic sugar on the pill, something that may help but is not essential: they see the real communicative power, and therefore also the biggest risks, as lying in the words. The Subjectivization of Uncertainty in Squarzoni’s Graphic Novel The graphic novel, as a form of comic, may be defined as “‘a medium that communicates through images, words, and sequence’ or ‘intermedial narratives based on words and images’, ‘comics’ or ‘graphic narratives’ are qualified media that conventionally tell stories through an interaction between words and images on the page.”24

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

93

This description of such formal traits, from a superficial point of view is, of course, quite similar to the formal description of the SPM that we discussed earlier. The constellations of the basic media of words and images are identical (even if the ratio of words and images is different), and so is the time-space sequencing of reading the report and the graphic novel. Here, it is important to consider the qualifying media aspects that have to do with the fact that different media types have different demands, different interpretations, and different uses. Therefore, the immediate intermedial similarities should not make us jump to the conclusion that the SPM and Climate Changed are read and used in the same ways. In what follows next, we investigate how Squarzoni works with the question of how to communicate climate science (which is crucial for the SPM, too). More specifically, we attempt to understand that it is more risky and difficult to communicate uncertainty, which is part of sound natural scientific practice, in a way that does not demolish the very message that is being conveyed. In short, how can the uncertainties of scientific results and scientific activity be represented without endangering the larger goals of the entire scientific process? As a way of starting the analysis, let us go back for a moment to the IPCC report and the pages containing paratexts before the report begins. They tell their own little story of authority and credibility. Figure 4.7 shows page 2 of the SPM. This page consists of two very long lists of names, creating an air of respectability and even authority—and as a result of these two elements, it pushes back uncertainty by providing a very long list of “Drafting authors” and another of “Contributing authors.” The lists of names give an impression of very strong geographical diversity (as opposed to a list of, say, only authors from northern or western nations), and the sheer number here is a statement in itself. It implies some kind of solidity and trustworthiness simply because so many researchers, from so many countries around the globe, stand behind the work, the arguments, and the recommendations. It is a demonstration of a certain notion of academic and scientific credibility resulting from the both practical and power-related demonstration of name after name after name. It is not until page 6, after the institutional frameworks of the report and of the IPCC have been noted, that the “real” content begins. No such thing is present in the graphic novel, of course, and although there is the standardized and unsurprising publishing information on page 4, there is a note on page 5 that is more interesting: The views expressed by the author in this book do not necessarily represent those of the interviewees, the institutions for which they work, or the organizations to which they belong. Errors may have crept into the manuscript despite the vigilance of the author and the editors. Finally, this book is also a story,

94

Chapter 4

Figure 4.7  The list of the names of the scientists creates a sense of authority and ­credibility. Source: IPCC, SPM, 2.

depicting events as they took place. Some factual information and figures cited herein were current when the events in the chapters unfolded, and some more recent events are not discussed.25

This note is a little confusing: it seems to begin on a legal level relating to responsibility or liability as regards the author’s ideas as opposed to the interviewees’ remarks. Then it moves on to a referential level concerning the risk of errors in the text, presumably errors of a more exact nature (wrong numbers, imprecise dating, or the like). In a third point, the author stresses that,

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

95

given the narrative nature of the book (“a story”), events in the author’s life correspond to scientific knowledge and other facts as these were perceived at the time referred to, and therefore more recent knowledge is not referred to. Confusing as the note may be, it nevertheless gives a very good indication of the strategy regarding truthfulness and uncertainty employed in the graphic novel: it stresses the use of interviewees, the risk of errors, and the fact that this is not a report or an article, but a story. This is followed by remarks that acknowledge how subjective time and space (relating to the autobiographical author) are part of the information economy and the represented scientific material. It therefore accurately expresses the communication strategy of the graphic novel: Squarzoni creates credibility not by suppressing subjectivity but by acknowledging it, or, to use Donna Haraway’s influential term, the necessarily situated nature of knowledge and the presentation of knowledge.26 But whereas this seems like a strict strategy in the French original, in the English translation this is followed by a preface written by climate scientist and NGO activist Nicole Whittington-Evans that, in a sense, offers a paratextual objective insurance that softens the “situatedness” of the note.27 The first seven pages in the graphic novel are dedicated to an aesthetic and existential reflection, and the first words outside the paratexts are as follows: “There are many ways to begin a book.”28 Squarzoni is stressing that there is not one objective way of narrating a story of such complexity. But as we shall see, the more Squarzoni stresses the subjectivity of his project, the more credible it becomes, which is a strange, almost paradoxical effect. Let us take a closer look at how the book does this by using five strategies that convey the scientific ideas about climate change in a way that avoids uncertainty as much as possible. The first and most conventional strategy, and the one that is close to the strategy the SPM employs, is to refer to science. For instance, after Squarzoni discusses planetary history, a book cover is represented as a kind of reference to what has been said (see figure 4.8).29 Another example is when the writer refers to the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, again “concluding” on a right-hand page that has a graph as a source rather than a book, as shown in figure 4.9.30 The second strategy, which is very frequently used in this work, is to put science in the mouth of scientists. In one place, Squarzoni reflects on future climate threats. Here he reproduces the cover of the book first and after that he puts the words of the book into the mouth of the writer, in this case, Jean-Marc Jancovici (see figure 4.10),31 another of whose works has been previously introduced by Squarzoni, on page 43 (see figure 4.8). Sometimes, several spreads are simply images of scientists (mostly men) explaining science, politics, or the nature of the IPCC’s work (see figure 4.11).32

96

Chapter 4

Figure 4.8  A book cover used as a reference. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

97

Figure 4.9  A graph used as a source. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

98

Chapter 4

Figure 4.10  Conversations with Jean-Marc Jancovici. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

99

Figure 4.11  Scientists (mostly men) explain science, politics, or the nature of the IPCC’s work. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

100

Chapter 4

Figure 4.12  The visualization of the greenhouse effect. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

The third strategy is to visualize the scientific material in new, often very creative and innovative visual forms. There are many examples of this, because the entire graphic novel is basically a comprehensive response to and mediation of the threatening ideas that science formulates

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

101

Figure 4.13  The visualization of the greenhouse effect. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

about the disastrous threats. The visualizations range from direct scientific images—for instance, picturing the process of the greenhouse effect (see figures 4.12, 4.13)33—to the reproduction of graphs from scientific articles or books.

102

Chapter 4

More ambitiously, Squarzoni translates scientific content into larger narrative visual series; for instance, when he first offers rather crude images of the 2008 heat wave, which led to wildfires, suffering, and death, and then finally presents an image of dry, cracked earth.34 From this page, he recycles the scorched earth images several times to critique how we tend to be bewildered by excessive information without really noticing what is happening.35 This strategy is then repeated in a new frame almost fifty pages later, with identical text but a new “grounding”: the global heating has created rising sea levels (see figure 4.14).36 These series lead us to the fourth strategy in two ways. First, because these series of images are a narrative in themselves, supported by an image of drought and leading to a more comprehensive idea that we are not really registering what is happening, and then to a third image showing that we, without noticing what is going to happen, are about to be drenched. Second, because this full page leads to a new section that clearly refers back to the opening sequence on how to begin a book: but now the subject is “The End”—there is a short section on how to end books and films that leads into a long section that is very critical of contemporary consumption culture and commercialism. In other words, one of the main devices that Squarzoni uses to convey his message is by way of narratives.37 Two major narratives mirror each other in Climate Changed. One is a grand narrative about the history of the planet and human life upon it that is under threat by global warming. The other is the story of how to narrate such a story, that is, the story that begins with the question of how to begin a “book” and leads to the question of “The End”—of books, of the world—it is a story of threatening death. The end of the world is mirrored by the death of the dog owned by Squarzoni and his partner, which is a premonition of even more tragic deaths. The fourth strategy, then, is a strong narrativization of the material, which is the duty of the author himself. The idea and consequences of climate change, as well as a life, are both structured in the form of a narrative. The fifth strategy adds human and existential aspects to the question of climate change. This strategy and its effect, in a sense, are built on and conclude all the aspects noted earlier; it has to do with incorporating science in a narrative form and making the science human by putting it in the mouth of scientists delivering the messages. It is also about visualizing the science in different registers by employing big narrative structures. All these aspects have a bearing on Squarzoni’s own life, and that fact, to quote the English title of the work, makes him a “climate changed” person. The five strategies—referencing science, using talking heads, visualizing science, narrativizing science, and adding existential and psychological aspects—all contribute to creating a distinct effect when it comes to

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

103

Figure 4.14  The rising sea levels. Source: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni. Saison Brune by Philippe Squarzoni © Éditions Delcourt. 2012. Text and illustrations by Philippe Squarzoni. Translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. English translation copyright © 2014 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. All rights reserved.

104

Chapter 4

the question of how to convey the scientific ideas about climate change while being aware of possible scientific uncertainties. We argue that the combined strategies used in Squarzoni’s graphic novel, where supporting pure science is only one part of the strategy, results in a very reliable and truthful communicative form. It anchors the science results not in repeatable scientific experiments or exact verbal formulas (where “very likely” can be translated into a certain probability interval), as was the case in the IPCC material. Instead, the graphic novel insists on using procedures and effects from outside the scientific facts and processes themselves. Squarzoni’s strategy is, paradoxically, to subjectivize the material as much as possible to create content that communicates science in the most reliable way possible.

FINAL WORDS It is, of course, a bit idiosyncratic to compare something as fundamentally different as an IPCC report and a graphic novel. On the other hand, let us not forget that from one point of view, we are dealing with material that shares several medial similarities: both media products use language, in different modal forms, combining the language with graphic illustrations in often very complex constellations, and both media products operate within what could be called a media transformation process where form and content are transported from hard sciences to a more accessible media form—be it a summary for laypeople or an artistic graphic novel. But the two examples demonstrate that due to the qualifying, contextualizing, and framing operations that surround and thus specify the affordances offered by different media types and specific media products, we relatively seldomly misconstrue a media product: we do not mistake a summary for an art object—or a graphic novel for a scientific summary. The average reader does not read the IPCC material to be entertained and to learn about an individual person’s meeting with science, and the same reader does not read the graphic novel to be updated on the most recent hardcore climate science. So the two media products resemble each other superficially, but they diverge in terms of their uses and content, and they both struggle with a comparable but very demanding task to reproduce complex science concerning climate change in a way that avoids the political dangers of acknowledging the scientific uncertainties. We believe that they both succeed, but that they do so by employing diametrically opposing methods: Squarzoni doubles up the subjective elements to secure the objectivity of science, whereas the SPM minimizes doubt by concentrating science in easy-to-grasp visualizations and by employing language that is devoid of doubts.

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

105

NOTES 1. Bettina Korintenberg et al., “Glossalia: Tidings from Terrestrial Tongues,” in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlshuhe: ZKM, Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2020), 325. 2. The following presentation of the question of truthfulness and media is based on Jørgen Bruhn, Niklas Salmose, Beate Schirrmacher, and Emma Tornborg, “Truthfulness and Truth Claims as Transmedial Phenomena,” in Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, eds. Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 225–254. 3. John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001): 709, https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/016344301023006002. 4. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 4. 5. This depends on audiences, though: in some fan-cultures, fidelity is an attractive strategy – anything creative or innovative is considered a sacrilege! 6. For a popular (and policy-directed) discussion of climate change nomenclature, see Joel Makower, “What’s the Right Word on Climate Change,” GreenBiz, May 21, 2019, https://www​.greenbiz​.com​/article​/whats​-right​-word​-climate​-change; For a more detailed analysis of the possible discursive advantages of referring to “climate change” versus “global warming,” see Wen Shi et al., “#Climatechange vs. #Globalwarming: Characterizing Two Competing Climate Discourses on Twitter with Semantic Network and Temporal Analyses,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 3 (February 2020): 1062. In what follows we refer to the history of the impact of climate science on political and cultural decisions as described in Joshua P. Howe, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). 7. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, https://www​.ipcc​.ch/. 8. Howe, Behind the Curve, 47. 9. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); Michael E. Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (London: Scribe, 2021). 10. Thomas Gaulkin, “Why the Bad News in the IPCC Report is Good News for Visual Learners,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (August 20, 2021), https://thebulletin​.org​/2021​/08​/why​-the​-bad​-news​-in​-the​-ipcc​-report​-is​-good​-news​-for​-visual​ -learners/. 11. Ibid. 12. Karen Genschow, “Dissensuale Erzählungen. Der Comic als Medium der Politik bei Philippe Squarzoni,” Closure. Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung 1 (November 2014): 53, 54, 51, http://www​.closure​.uni​-kiel​.de​/closure1​/genschow. 13. Ann Gardiner, “Environmental Collapse in Comics: Reflections on Philippe Squarzoni’s Saison brune,” in The Discourses of Environmental Collapse: Imagining the End, eds. Alison E. Vogelaar, Brack W. Hale, and Alexandra Peat (London: Routledge, 2018), 65–87, 67.

106

Chapter 4

14. See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 15. Philippe Squarzoni, Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science, trans. Ivanka Hahnenberger (New York: Abrams, 2014). Original publication in French: Philippe Squarzoni, Saison Brune (Paris: Éditions Delcourt, 2012). 16. As mentioned in Gaulkin’s, “Why the Bad News”; “Visual Identity Guidelines” is available here: https://wg1​.ipcc​.ch​/sites​/default​/files​/documents​/ipcc​_visual​ -identity​_guidelines​.pdf. 17. Adam Corner, Chris Shaw, and Jamie Clarke, Principles for Effective Communication and Public Engagement on Climate Change: A Handbook for IPCC Authors (Oxford: Climate Outreach, 2018), 5, https://www​.ipcc​.ch​/site​/assets​/uploads​/2017​ /08​/Climate​-Outreach​-IPCC​-communications​-handbook​.pdf. 18. For a short discussion on the tactics of employing “uncertainty” in political discussions on climate change, see Leo Barasi, The Climate Majority: Apathy and Action in an Age of Nationalism (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2017), 139–142. 19. This is supposedly because this is not considered a scientific issue per se—all scientists and policymakers the least bit interested in the question would find it unnecessary to repeat the distinction. 20. IPCC, “2021: Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press), 4, https://www​.ipcc​.ch​/report​/ar6​/wg1​/downloads​/report​/ IPCC​_AR6​_WGI​_SPM​.pdf. 21. Ibid., note 4. Please note that in this endnote and those that follow, we adhere to the IPCC pagination system. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. Ibid., 20. 24. Karin Kukkonen, Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (West Sussex: John Wiley, 2013), 4; Gabrielle Rippl and Lukas Etter, “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 191, as quoted in Mats Arvidsson et al., “Intermedial Combination,” in Bruhn and Schirrmacher, Intermedial Studies, 107. 25. Squarzoni, Climate Changed, 5. 26. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 575–599. 27. Squarzoni, Climate Changed, 6–7. 28. Ibid., 8. 29. Ibid., 43. Last image. 30. Ibid., 103. 31. Ibid., 83. 32. Ibid., 83–88 or 100–102, 349–353, 350. 33. Ibid., 46–47.

Mediating Uncertainties of Climate Change Science

34. Ibid., 89. 35. Ibid., 215. 36. Ibid., 294. 37. Ibid., 295.

107

Chapter 5

Future Food Cultures

Although food is essential to humans and is something we engage with every day, it tends not to be a central focus of discussions that take place in the overall discourse of climate change. One possible reason for this is how proximate food is to tradition, heritage, and culture, and hence, in some ways, food is seen as untouchable—it should not be changed. Nevertheless, food is increasingly gaining attention as part of the climate puzzle, with sustainable food cultures seen as an important step toward deaccelerating the climate crisis; climate science refers to this as “a Great Food Transformation.”1 This shift needs to challenge the way food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed, which is a tremendous systemic and logistical endeavor, not least because it needs to take into consideration the unresolved and poorly understood cultural challenge of changing a culture’s understanding and consumption of food. Food and the way people eat are intimately tied to cultural heritage and to reproductions of ethnic, gendered, class, and racial identities. Food is also explicitly related to several of the reasons behind climate change. According to the UN’s list mentioned earlier, food systems around the world account for about 30 percent of the world’s total energy consumption (food production, food transportation, and food storage); there are massive conversions of biodiverse land for agriculture; and obesity is caused by the overconsumption of unhealthy food. In January 2022, The Lancet published a call to action called Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. The Lancet Commission observes that [c]ivilisation is in crisis. We can no longer feed our population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources . . . The dominant diets that the world has been producing and eating for the past 50 years are no longer nutritionally optimal, are a major contributor to climate change, and are accelerating erosion of natural biodiversity. Unless there is a comprehensive shift in how the world 109

110

Chapter 5

eats, there is no likelihood of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—with food and nutrition cutting across all 17 SDGs—or of meeting the Paris Agreement on climate change.2

The aim of the commission is to help outline how this shift in “how the world eats” can come about. In its summary report, it launches a very ambitious program aimed at making people eat in ways that are more sustainable both for their bodies and for their environment. This program is scientifically very well grounded and a necessary step toward addressing both poor diets and climate change. But The Lancet report has also been criticized. The Italian ambassador in the United States, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, argued, among other things, that it would “destroy traditional diets which are part of global and cultural heritages.”3 Similarly, Harry Harris observed in an article in the New Statesman that “the report doesn’t really acknowledge food as a cultural thing.”4 And Claude Fischler put forward a succinct argument in an influential article: Food is central to our sense of identity. The way any given human group eats helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organization, and at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently. Food is also central to individual identity, in that any given human individual is constructed, biologically, psychologically and socially by the food he/she chooses to incorporate.5

It is perhaps easier, then, to sort your garbage and cancel that flight to Thailand than to start eating insects, for all the reasons Fischler points out. Mediations of food can be differentiated between what Pamela Goyan ­Kittler, Kathryn P. Sucher, and Marcia Nahikian-Nelms distinguish as eating and feeding: “Eating is distinguished from feeding by the ways that humans use food.”6 Thus, the authors argue, humans “do not feed,” they eat, because they cultivate and preserve food and they cook and flavor food, but primarily because they consume food in ritualistic ways using certain utensils. Animals, by contrast, can be said to feed because they do not do these things. You could say that to consume nutrition without culture is to feed, whereas to consume nutrition with culture is to eat. Nevertheless, the medial awareness of how food discourses are communicated and mediated is increasingly gaining scientific interest, especially in the field of critical food studies. Michelle Phillipov considers the role of media in Media and Food Industries: The New Politics of Food, looking critically at how media are used to negotiate industrially processed food in the context of an increasing awareness of sustainability and ethics in food production.7 Other notable work in this direction explores the relationship between the environment and food as socially practiced, imagined, and mediated phenomena. Cordula Kropp, Irene Antoni-Komar, and Colin Sage have investigated

Future Food Cultures

111

how local social networks seek to create more sustainable food systems, and Anna Jones has examined how food pedagogy is transformed by, and seeks to intervene in, discourses about climate change and race.8 Climate fiction (cli-fi) is recognized as “a powerful medium to explore hopes and fears about climate change and imagine potential solutions,”9 and it systematically investigates what daily life might be like if the climate crisis is not averted and as humanity transitions to more sustainable ways of eating, producing energy, and traveling. Critical food studies so far have been predominantly sociological and anthropological in nature, but some attention has been given to how film and literature narrate food and eating.10 Most of this work does not address questions of sustainability, but one chapter of Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth’s Literature and Food Studies explores how utopian fiction from Thomas Moore onwards has imagined a virtuous and sustainable relationship to the planet and to food.11 There are several studies that consider the representation of food in climate fiction. Lykke Guanio-Uluru examines how plants are represented in Young Adult (YA) climate fiction; Corina Löwe studies the representation of food shortages in YA cli-fi; Astrid Bracke devotes part of a chapter of Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel to the relationship between urbanity and food, and Tereso Bothelo explores food as a signifier of risk in four American cli-fi novels.12 As The Lancet report and several recent critics concur, food must be considered in a global context. It is hard to disagree; food globally unveils several political issues on a grand scale relating to ethics, poverty, colonialism and decolonization, and global and racial capitalism. Food will be the main topic of this chapter’s intermedial ecocritical analysis; it will focus on two media types that are intrinsically different in that one springs from the scientific community and the other from the food industry. The first media product is the website eatforum​.or​g, which is part of the EAT-Lancet Commission’s dedicated and ambitious work that aims to spread the word about the need for a changed food culture. The commission clearly realizes that scientific reports have a limited impact on potential changes and grassroots work. Eatforum​.o​rg contains popular science and targets a general audience interested in the connection between environmental questions and food, so its intentions are clear. The second media product is a television advertisement titled “Dear Piece of Meat—We Need to Talk.”13

STEP 1 Before we discuss the two media products chosen for the intermedial analysis in this chapter, it is worth describing the media contexts and discourses

112

Chapter 5

they are situated in and what is generally attributed to the notion of “food media.” Food media refers to all media that, in one way or another, communicate ideas about food.14 According to Phillipov, food media includes media communication of food production, food politics, and food consumption.15 Food media has a long tradition; some of the oldest books are cookbooks, and as the twentieth century became medially intensified, journals, advertisements, radio programs, and, later, TV programs related to gastronomy became staples. Since the 1980s, we have had medial mixes of investigative journalism, autobiography, memoirs, lifestyle narratives, YouTube videos, shared films, commercials, social media contributions, celebrity chefs, and food markets all communicating ideas, ideologies, and politics regarding the effects of producing food and food consumption. In fact, one can argue that, recently, food has saved traditional media types in decline, such as books and television. To these mediations, we can add representations of food in fictional media, such as film, literature, and TV series, or, for that matter, in video games.16 Food media are also what make up a food media industry, and this opens itself up to the same critical scrutiny that is part of critical food studies. Discourses about food are therefore highly transmedial and complex constructions of industrial and alternative food politics.17 Food is entertainment, but usually it is much more than that. Recently, we have observed a conflict between food producers and food consumers, and critical food studies have mostly been occupied with investigations of the mediations of food in terms of consumer interests, ethics, lifestyle, and sustainability. Earlier investigations can be labeled as belonging to the category of food toxicity: how can food be dangerous? The American film Super Size Me (2004) illustrates this focus when the consumer dangers of eating industrially produced fast food are mediated. Super Size Me is quite typical of this new food media: it is personal and activist. The debate runs in parallel with an emphasis on consumer health and lifestyle as well as human and nonhuman ethics. In addition to seeing this pattern in documentary films, we can observe the trending genre of locavore literature, where the focus is on local food production and consumption, or, as Hugh Campbell phrases it, “Food from Somewhere” rather than “Food from Nowhere.”18 Campbell’s division of food as belonging to two different cultures is similar to another influential division, that between mainstream food media and alternative food media. Food media, in general, are considered to be mediations made through industrial and commodified food, whereas alternative food media attempt to mediate food discourses through an ecological and ethically responsible filter.19 The concept of alternative food media has a commercial value too, of course, especially when an increasing section of the Western middle class is gradually starting to challenge industrial food

Future Food Cultures

113

practices. One consequence of this turn is the growing visibility of cookbooks with a focus on global sustainability, for example, One Pot, One Pan, One Planet by Anna Jones; Eat Green by Melissa Hemsley; 30 Easy Ways to Join the Food Revolution by Ollie Hunter; Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet by Tom Hunt; and For the Love of the Land compiled by Jenny Jeffries.20 As food media constantly evidence, consumer choice is an important driver for changing food politics.21 In activist and locavore food media, good food is represented in quite specific terms: it is small-scale and artisanal; it is embedded in a particular place and can be trusted; it is produced by people with commitment and knowledge in idyllic locations; and it is authentic. These propagandistic initiatives have not gone unnoticed by critics, who have complained about the neoliberal, conservative, and even nostalgic tendencies in these narratives. They note that these discourses disregard issues related to gender, ethnicity, and class in their opportunistic and unreflexive representations of idyllic fantasies of pleasure and an escape from urban, industrial landscapes, or, as Kate Soper calls it, alternative hedonism.22 Some, like Phillipov, even claim that narration whose content can be described as locavore is counter-productive for a global sustainable food culture because of how it easily silences any anxieties about a global food crisis.23 Eatforum​.o​rg The first media product to be analyzed in this chapter is the EAT-Lancet Commission’s website, www​.eatforum​.org.24 The commission includes thirty-seven world-leading scientists in fields such as human health, agriculture, political science, and environmental sustainability; their ambition is to ease the transition to sustainable diets and food cultures. The commission realized that scientific articles have a significant impact within scientific communities but less so in other more public constellations outside science, so it constructed a popular scientific website, eatforum​.or​g. The website appeals to a nonscientific public with a general interest in environmental questions and sustainable food discourses. The main objective of the website is to spread information about and encourage a changing food culture.25 Eatforum​.or​g, thus, can be considered a detailed and accurate transformation of scientific facts into a media product with significant popular scientific potential. Placing eatforum​.o​rg within the qualified submedia of popular science places it in a blended genre where the aesthetics and forms of scientific communicative discourse are merged with popular forms. As James Hannam so convincingly argues throughout “A Brief History of Popular Science:

114

Chapter 5

Explaining the World through the Ages,” popular science is not a recent phenomenon but stems from vernacular expositions of natural philosophy in antiquity.26 Yet, as Hannam explains, popular science as a genre exploded in the early twentieth century, when science increasingly became entertainment, education, and news.27 The blended genre has been successful specifically when it comes to communicating popular astronomy and history,28 but also regarding ecological and later climate change issues. Rachel Carson’s seminal work, Silent Spring, is a standout example of the impact that ecological communication can have when it is packaged in a popular format.29 Carson’s critical book on the dangerous effects of pesticides was an essential driver for legislating against the use of DDT and other pesticides in US agriculture. It also changed the general opinion, making it against the use of pesticides.30 To summarize, popular science as a qualified media type seems closer to science communication than other transmediations from science to news, art, and social media. We could see these kinds of transformations (transmediations that do not change the concepts too much) as benign transmediations. In the particular case of eatforum​.or​g, the medial target of the website is quite benign in relation to the EAT-Lancet science. The commercial advertisement, on the other hand, has little to do with scientific facts—at least at first glance. The way that the commercial situates itself as being about organically produced food implicitly positions it in the large discourse of alternative food media, and “the great food transformation” owes a certain debt to the science concerning food and climate change. However, the contrast between the two media types can be found in their respective goals; eatforum​.o​rg aims to spread knowledge and initiate what are, according to the EAT-Lancet Commission, the necessary transformations that should lead toward a new, globally sustainable food culture. On the other hand, “Dear Piece of Meat”’s main objective is to sell products and increase the revenue of the food retailer that the commercial advertises, Coop. However, if we consider these two disparate media products as parts of the general food media discourse, it is interesting to compare more specifically what and how they communicate ideas about a sustainable future food culture. As disparate as they might be, they both still rely heavily on transmedial concepts of truthfulness (see the detailed description in chapter 4). The report comes from a scientific community and employs several conventional truth claims, so most readers would consider it to be truthful (unless its results contradict their opinions). Truthfulness is always a contract between a producer and an audience. As we explained in chapter 4, media scholar Gunn Enli argues that we must see authenticity and truthfulness as “a social construction, but it traffics in representations of reality.”31 Truthfulness relates to evaluations of its relation to reality, and truthfulness is mediated. Hence, when we discuss truthfulness in mediation, we

Future Food Cultures

115

have to consider the specific truth claims that are in play and that are conditioned by the affordances of each specific media type. Truthfulness can be achieved by combining media modalities or even aspects of media, but aspects of truthfulness can also be transmediated between different media. The Lancet report’s media type is scientific communication, which means, that it is perceived by its readers as having a high degree of truthfulness. We respond to the truth claims made by the media’s material characteristics, and we evaluate their truthfulness according to the conventions of qualified media. “Dear Piece of Meat—We Need to Talk” The second media product we will discuss in this chapter is “Dear Piece of Meat—We Need to Talk,” a one-minute-long commercial for the Swedish supermarket chain Coop Sweden. It is mainly aimed at television audiences. Coop stands for cooperative, and the chain has been owned by different cooperative constellations. It was originally founded by the Kooperativa Förbundet (the Cooperative Union) in 1899, which changed its name later. The organization has its own brands: X-tra (products with the lowest prices), Coop (uniformly designed good-quality products at a low price), and, most importantly in our context, Änglamark (Angel field) (organic products; the range has been available since 1991). The medial qualities of the commercial will be described in step 2, but we will provide a brief summary of its narrative content next. The first image is of a plate with a grilled rib-eye steak on it, accompanied by some grilled cherry tomatoes. The voiceover is constructed as a letter addressed to meat in general (“Dear Piece of Meat”) that laments the fact that we need to eat less meat. The next images are of humans and nonhumans eating meat, and then there are images of trees being chopped down, the Earth from space, firefighters with hosepipes working in a forest fire, and flooding. The voice tells us that the planet will always be fine, but humans will suffer (because of these environmental impacts). Then there are some beautiful images of cows, and the voice tells us about the negative effects that producing meat has on the environment in terms of high CO2 emissions. Next there is a series of images in which green beans are picked (they look like green beans, though the later images look as though they are of peapods), a peapod is split open, and peas are held in a child’s hand, and then she puts one of them into her mouth. The voice explains how much more protein we can produce if we focus on vegetable proteins rather than meat, and that we use much more land to breed and feed animals. Then there is an image of a tractor plowing some land and a montage of several high-perspective shots of traditional meat dishes cooked in different ways (meat stew, meatballs,

116

Chapter 5

Bolognese, a hamburger, and a meatloaf), while the voiceover proclaims that we simply need to eat less meat. It is worth mentioning here that the food shown is similar to the food seen in traditional Swedish food cultures, such as barbecued food and the food cooked for Sunday family dinners (which connect generations). Much of this food is produced at industrial levels, as suggested by the image of the tractor plowing the field. Next, we are faced with, for the first time, a moving handheld camera that is filming a couple with a baby; they are in the kitchen and are cooking food. The narrating voice now informs us that we love meat and it is difficult to change, and that in addition to this, many people, stressed as they are in their everyday life, do not have expertise in vegetarian cooking. Images of vegetarian food (vegetable stew, rice on its own, and baby food) follow, and an image of a child refusing to eat is sustained by the concern expressed by the voiceover, which is that many of us are not sure whether children will eat this new food. Then another montage is shown; it is similar to the first one showing meat dishes but only includes vegetarian food and has more rapid changes between images. The narrating voice aims to calm us next, saying that there is so much delicious vegetarian food that is also healthy. The frenetic montage ends with a longer, wide shot of a family in a summer garden in the early evening, eating and raising their glasses for a toast. The final image in the commercial is the same one it started with—the plate with a grilled steak on it. The voiceover continues, saying that “we can make it if we help each other,” and the final line of the commercial is the hashtag #TheNewEverydayFood. The narrator ends the film with “Dear Piece of Meat, we hope you understand” and then the superimposed text of the food chain Coop and a web link. The film was aired in 2016 and caused some commotion among viewers, representatives from the meat-producing business, and producers of organic food. It is clear that the general message of the advertisement, at least superficially (we will get back to this in step 2), aims to stimulate Swedes to eat less meat, so it is quite understandable that the meat industry reacted negatively.32 The film has been viewed more than 475,000 times (November 2022) on YouTube, and it has 1,757 likes. Although some comments are clearly negative, the majority of the critique is positive and celebrates the radicalism and braveness of Coop in taking this stand against the meat industry and advocating for a greener world. In short, the exposure and the debate that followed must have been seen by Coop as highly productive for its brand and in line with its increased focus on ecological and organic food produce and sales. It is clear from some of the comments on YouTube that some viewers intended to change from shopping at their usual supermarkets to shopping at Coop as a result of learning about Coop’s green focus from the commercial. It is impossible for us to investigate

Future Food Cultures

117

whether this really happened, though, and it is not the focus of this analysis. However, the diversification in the debates and discussions following the airing of the commercial testifies to how complex the concept of food media is, yet the commercial still had a significant impact. Since “Dear Piece of Meat” belongs to the category of food chain advertisement, it seems productive to compare it with Phillipov’s revealing analysis of the commodification of green food and how the green food industry is aiming for a changed food culture that entails ethical and local food production and consumption.33 Phillipov provides a series of investigations into how food is mediated in a politicized way and looks at food television and the use of celebrity chefs, food tourism, cookbooks, and supermarket strategies. In a chapter on the Australian supermarket chain Coles, Phillipov describes how the supermarket attempts to transform industrially produced food (food from nowhere) into something that feels like locally and ethically produced food (food from somewhere) by designing supermarket advertisements that portray Coles almost as if it is an artisan food producer and seller. It is worth referring to her analysis of Coles’ advertisements at some length since it may be useful for understanding the “Dear Piece of Meat” advertisement: The television commercial begins with Curtis Stone [an Australian celebrity chef] welcoming the viewer into Coles’ fresh produce section via a farm gate. The supermarket appears as an Arcadian rural market, where windmills, hay bales and rustic wooden wagons surround colourful, flawless fruit and vegetables. Appealing to a similar sense of the nostalgia and romance of “oldfashioned” methods of food production . . . these scenes draw upon the idyllic rural imagery associated with traditional family farming and the quaint practices of (an imagined) yesteryear, when farmers rode on antique tractors, deployed scarecrows rather than pesticides, and lovingly harvested each piece of fresh produce by hand.34

Within the critical literature on industrial food, the supermarket is understood not just as a food system actor that exerts considerable power over the food system;35 its practices are also understood to epitomize “food from nowhere,”36 in which the industrial, technical, geographical, and social processes of food production are largely invisible. Supermarket food is often contrasted with healthier and more authentic food that can be purchased from farmers. Consequently, the food industry conflates its industrial production with mediations of the truth of “good food,” which involves symbolic representations of “authenticity” and “tradition” as a means of renegotiating the contested terrain of supermarket food provisioning. For example, product packaging may feature pictures of farms that look as if they belong in a children’s storybook, which look quite different from the real-life farms that are actually required to supply enough food to a major retail chain. These

118

Chapter 5

strategies for building trust now also include more explicit attempts to engage with food politics and food media tropes. They have resulted in a wider range of strategies to, in Tania Lewis and Alison Huber’s words, “ethicalize” supermarket brand identities.37 Since the mid-2010s, Swedish food stores and brand advertisements have increasingly been targeting the growing awareness of how food is produced, as well as health issues and the climate. Scanning commercials from that time to the time of writing reveals how the Swedish food industry is not only trying to create superficial parallels, as in Coles’ case, but also between locally produced food and industrially produced food. It has also taken the ethicalization a step further to fully support the campaign for organic food in parallel with support for industrially produced food. The focus on organic products is used to establish a reputation for being concerned about the climate and animal care as a strategy to attract green customers into its stores. “Dear Piece of Meat” does not lean on an evidence-based scientific background like eatforum​.o​rg does, but its effect is still highly dependent on communicating a sense of authority and truthfulness. It is essential that the commercial, a qualified media type, does not come across to the consumer as only a sales pitch. To summarize, the comparative intermedial ecocritical analysis in this chapter focuses on two discordant contributions to the noisy discourse of food media, in which all mediations of food contribute to the awareness (or ignorance) of the need for a changed food culture in order to battle the ongoing climate crisis. The intermedial analysis of these two media products will therefore focus on how they communicate ideas about food, particularly how these ideas resonate with food and the climate crisis. Part of this analysis will also deal with transmedial questions of truthfulness and ecological agency. STEP 2: INTERMEDIAL DESCRIPTION Eatforum​.o​rg The media product eatforum​.o​rg belongs to the media type website.38 It is a heteromedial media type consisting of the basic media of words, images, visual illustrations, animations, and moving photorealistic images. It can be experienced through several technical devices of display (laptop, tablet, or mobile phone), but whichever is used, the experience is tactile because the hand and fingers are used to scroll and click through the pages using a mouse, keyboard, or touch screen. In terms of spatiotemporality, it is twodimensional and consists of a nonlinear, individualized (subjective) temporality—even though many websites are designed to provide information in a particular order. The website is easy to navigate and offers the opportunity to

Future Food Cultures

119

explore it in different ways with different focus points, so it is highly interactive. The interactivity is something the website shares with other media types, most notably the computer game. Here, however, interaction is not connected to game- or goal-oriented aspects, as discussed in chapter 6. Its design is simple and full of contrasts, and its layout feels spacious. It gives an impression, at least initially, of lucidity and confidence, but as one starts to navigate in it, it is also unexpectedly complex, with many subpages and different and new categories. It is not always easy to find exactly what one is looking for or expecting. “Dear Piece of Meat—We Need to Talk” “Dear Piece of Meat” is of the media type television commercial. The basic media consist of spoken words, written texts, moving images, and audio. In the case analyzed here, the technical device of display used for viewing the commercial on Coop Sweden’s YouTube channel is a desktop computer with a speaker attached. The specific circumstances of watching this video on a desktop and in the YouTube environment bring both a lot of medial enhancements to the experience (other similar videos, comments, and likes) and a lot of choices that need to be made to interact with the video’s spatiotemporal qualities (freeze the image, repeat, change the order, turn off the sound, manipulate the sound, zoom in on an image, or change the color scheme); however, for this intermedial analysis, we consider the commercial as it would have been experienced on the technical device of display it was intended for: a television (or a screen showing a streamed version of a program) with audio speakers built in. Obviously, there are also several contexts of that medium that affect the experience of the commercial—the television program it breaks up, which programs are shown before and after the advertisement, the social atmosphere of the room the television is in, and so on—but we will not deal with those here. In terms of its modalities and modes, “Dear Piece of Meat” has a spatiotemporality that is linear in terms of time and two-dimensional in terms of its screen appearance. The material modality consists of a screen on a television, laptop, computer monitor, tablet, mobile phone, or, potentially, a cinema screen. The sensorial input is restricted to vision and sound, but, as we will discuss in step 3, in a cross-modal fashion, it potentially also reaches out to the olfactory and gustatory modes in ways of simulating these modes. In terms of sound, the commercial consists of a male narrator’s voice, sound effects that accompany the images but at a low volume (i.e., diegetic sounds), and a soundtrack (playing Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat Major, op. 100, second movement (nondiegetic music)). In the semiotic modality, the audience will make sense of the sounds in a symbolic way (the narrated text), an indexical way (diegetic

120

Chapter 5

sound effects), even if the sounds do not necessarily correspond with the images, and a symbolic way (certain sounds carry symbolic weight). When it comes to Schubert’s second movement of his piano trio, things become complex in terms of the semiotic meaning. As Signe Kjær Jensen and Martin Knust argue in a discussion of the media modalities of music, instrumental music has the capacity to operate on all three semiotic levels: on the iconic level, in terms of how music is similar to certain emotions; on the symbolic level, because its emotional content is highly based on the use of musical conventions; and on the indexical level, in terms of how music has a “causal effect on our own bodies and emotional state.”39 The written text in the film is interpreted in a symbolic way. The moving images are primarily indexical in terms of how similar they are to the real-life events taking place (photographic material showing the reality, whether they are staged or not), but at times they are also symbolic in the sense that they are symbols, metaphors, or allegories for meanings beyond their indexical appearances. STEP 3: ANALYSIS Eatforum​.o​rg Eatforum​.o​rg is an informative and popular scientific website that aims to represent a basic scientific fact: a radical change in food culture and production is essential. Hence, the site has a clear and explicit goal, which influences the layout and content, including its eclectic mix of information, news, shorter press releases and longer scientific or popular scientific articles and reports, colorful images, diagrams, and a few short films and animations. The website is organized using five categories: “Learn & Discover,” “Knowledge,” “Initiatives,” “Events,” and “About EAT.” At the top of the “About EAT” page (which is perhaps the first section many viewers will look at), we are presented with an image on the left of the page of green seedlings; their color is vividly emphasized against the dark soil in which they have been planted. The color green is a common symbol for ecology, life, and health. The layout on the eatforum​.o​rg website is mostly constructed of images and texts alongside each other so that the text is complemented by visual imagery and vice versa (see figure 5.1). The text to the right of the image on the “About EAT” page reads “Who we are,” and the use of the third-person pronoun evidences a sense of community and agency. This is further developed by the text beneath it, which reads, “EAT is a global, non-profit startup dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, impatient disruption and novel partnerships,” and in combination with the image of the seedlings, this suggests a grassroots,

Future Food Cultures

121

Figure 5.1  A screenshot of the Eatforum​.o​rg webpage. “About EAT: Who We Are” Source: https://eatforum​.org​/about/.

nonprofit movement that engages in activity that is separate from that of established institutions—it is new and exciting, immersive, and inclusive. This is a good example of how images and texts successfully complement each other across the entire website. If we scroll down to beneath the picture of the seedlings just described, we will see the heading “People”. This is placed on the opposite side of the page to the “Who we are” heading, for contrast and variation in design. Underneath this heading, the first paragraph starts by saying, “Our people are our greatest strength,” which further cements the sense of crossing borders between different cultures, countries, and professions. The idea of “People” is completed by a photo to the right of this heading of a group of smiling EAT administrators, researchers, and other collaborators standing on a conference stage against a huge backdrop with a photo of London on it. The group photo looks up-to-date in our digital world, and the text above the photo is emphasized by the use of capital letters; it says, “WHAT WILL YOU DO?” The effect of all this is that we feel part of the EAT concept, even without knowing its exact contours. The interactive aspect of browsing the website is inclusive in itself, and having the choice to zoom in on EAT’s independence and freedom adds to this sense of community and participation. This is extended on the pages called “Knowledge” and “Initiatives.” On the “Knowledge” page, we are met with a saturated photo of a woman selling spices and vegetables at a market or bazaar. Taken from above, it signals objectivity, which connects to scientific overviews. The subtitle to the left of the photo emphasizes a global focus, which is suggested by the non-Western look of the photo: “Can we feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries?”

122

Chapter 5

This can also be seen as a response to the criticism of the EAT-Lancet report, mentioned earlier, that it does not value food traditions and food culture, seeing food culture as being about feeding rather than eating. Here we can see the possibility that the food industry can be changed and that food can still be valued as tradition, ritual, and culture.40 If we click on “Read more” underneath the heading “The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health,” we are given new choices: “The Science,” “The Planetary Health Diet,” and “The Commission.” “The Science” allows us to download and read a popular scientific summary of the report (available in nine languages). The photo above the “The Planetary Health Diet” heading is of an inviting pink veggie smoothie instead of the common image of meals made of insects depicted on similar websites. Clicking here reveals a pie chart illustrated as a dinner plate that shows us what a sustainable, healthy meal could look like for a future global population. Further down the page, we can see the so-called Briefs, which focus on professions and more specific themes such as cities, farmers, food professionals, health care, administration, leadership, and people in general. This is an opportunity, then, to zoom in on specific areas of interest, and here there are links to recorded lectures, handson advice, condensed scientific reports, videos, and podcasts. Finally, the user can have a look at “The Commission” section, where there is a transparent overview of the structure of the organization. The “Knowledge” page offers exactly what the title communicates: general and more specific knowledge that is organized depending on what the reader is interested in and what their background is, and this is designed in an inclusive way and includes different levels and genres of scientific expertise. This is a way to acknowledge the truthfulness of the scientific background, and the description of the commission certainly makes the entire website more trustworthy. The “Initiatives” page focuses on how this expertise will be transformed into action and agency. We are met with the following text: In order to translate knowledge into scalable action, EAT has initiated partnerships, programs and projects to reach specific sectors that can bring about change. Our programs and partnerships currently in place or under development focus on business, individual countries, cities, chefs, and children.

Here we can find concrete advice about how the conclusions of the EAT report about sustainable urban food cultures can be implemented by policymakers, within the financial sector, and in agriculture. Further down the page, in a section where the common white background changes to a black background, we can read about how children and young adults can be encouraged to become active and participate in the food culture change. One of these initiatives is the CO-CREATE dialogue forum tool, which aims to engage young people to construct and shape their own future surroundings

Future Food Cultures

123

and health, with a focus on avoiding obesity. CO-CREATE is a collaborative project that is run by EAT and fourteen research and advocacy organizations under the leadership of the Norwegian Institute for Public Health. Besides a summary of the project, there is a photomontage in monochrome that attracts our attention: a bowl that is half full of spaghetti, a young woman who is screaming toward the camera, a close-up of two feet wearing sneakers that look as though the person is jumping in the air, candy in a shop, and Planet Earth. If a user does not have the patience to read the entire text, the photomontage captures the gist of the project.41 “Dear Piece of Meat” It is obvious that Coop’s commercial focuses on the climate and health benefits of eating less meat. Nonetheless, organic food and vegetables—food from somewhere—are only a small portion of the staples of industrially produced food. Hence, the ethical message needs to be balanced so that the outcome is not the message that we should be totally dismissive of meat. Although the commercial notes several facts about the consequences of meat production on the environment, these are only mentioned briefly and could be seen as being overshadowed by the audiovisual qualities of the commercial. Nowhere in the film does Coop suggest that we abandon meat altogether, only that we eat less of it. In fact, the first image of the film, shown in figure 5.2, creates a strong appetite for a grilled piece of meat (at least if you are not a vegetarian/vegan);

Figure 5.2  The first image of “Dear Piece of Meat.” Source: Coop Sverige, “Kära köttbit,” YouTube, September 15, 2016, 0:00, https://youtu​.be​/XE54YqxrRsE.

124

Chapter 5

the steak is perfectly cooked and has symmetrical grill marks on it. The juiciness of the beef is exaggerated by the extra liquid that has been put on top of it. The different brown tones of the beef and the red tomatoes with their green stems create harmony on top of the framing, a white plate. The same goes for the later montage of situations in which people are eating meat. In addition, the images of cows in the early morning mist with the sun rising in the background, of green beans being picked, and of a field being ploughed in the sunshine suggest summer landscapes that reflect the very essence of Sweden and offer a sense that the meat Coop sells is not food from nowhere, but rather meat produced locally. It is interesting here to consider what the narrator says while the images of farming and cows are being shown. This is when we are informed about how much more resources are needed to produce meat compared to producing vegetarian protein substitutes. Hence, there is a potential medial conflict between how the two basic media of sound and image contradict each other. The narrating voice, a deep, male adult and very relaxed but confident voice, gives authority and believability to the more informative and critical discourse that the commercial offers.42 Even though the voice does not have the same level of truthfulness as the more scientifically oriented information on the eatforum​.o​rg website, it still conveys a sense that this film, however commercial it is, arises from a vague scientific discourse about our planet. The authority of the voice, therefore, balances the possible lack of truthfulness and climate-related authenticity in the very qualification of the media type commercial film—everyone reckons that these kinds of films are, in one way or another, lying. The serious aspect of the film’s message, then, must not be lost in the predetermined perception of a commodified film product. Nevertheless, the images of nature and cows in this particular sequence speak to a very different theme: that despite the negative consequences of meat production and consumption on our climate, the meat sold by Coop is still qualitatively and ethically sound. Even though the narrator’s voice suggests the earnestness of climate science, the very text he utters has its own qualifications. Starting with the words “Dear Meat,” it situates itself in the genre of narrative letter writing, in this case, a breaking-up letter. Of course, this grants the film a sense of humor and originality that certainly plays a part in its general popularity. But it clearly designs a communicative act as involving a sender and receiver, and the sender’s position is somewhat ambiguous. The quality of the voice and the general setup seem to distance the sender of the commercial from the producer, Coop. The use of the third-person pronoun “we” rather than “I” signals a collective concern in a similar way to how eatforum​.o​rg invites the users to have a collective climate-related consciousness. Even if the “we” only concerns the relation between humans and meat, the communicative effect

Future Food Cultures

125

is one of participation and moral dedication, and it does promote ecological agency to some extent. The sense of collective concern is also evident at the end of the film, when the narrator concludes that “we can make it if we help each other.” The “it” is somewhat vague; does it concern eating less meat, saving the planet, consuming healthier food, or even initiating the “great food transformation,” which we mentioned initially in this chapter? The fact that this change is not specified might even work inclusively in the sense that the film’s message is broadened to match the specific expectations and foregrounded assumptions and beliefs that each viewer might be predisposed to have. It is also significant that the narrator’s concluding remark coincides with, first, a series of close-up or semi-close-up shots portraying details of food in a particular setting (someone serving themselves some salad leaves from a salad bowl, a fork being scooped into a Greek salad, and a boy biting a corncob) and then ends with a final, long shot of that very same setting. The visual construction of this final image is important; here we see a mix of generations enjoying a classic Swedish outdoor dinner in the summer twilight, framed by the verdure of a garden, with tealights in holders on the table and garlands of lightbulbs hanging in the trees above. The diners are raising a toast, but we can barely hear the clinking of glasses and the collective mumbles of celebration on the soundtrack. This final shot is also, significantly, by far the longest single shot in the entire film, so it stands out as a final statement in a cinematic rhythm that has been steadily paced in the tradition of the commercials genre. The connotations of this image are crucial, at least in a Swedish context, since they allude to one or maybe both of the two most traditional summer celebrations in the country, the midsummer party and the August crayfish party, without really explicitly using the specific icons related to either of them. Therefore, again, the scene operates within certain iconic specificities of Swedish summer celebrations but also through a general temporal indistinctness, which allows viewers to connect this to their own memories of summer. Even so, because of how this scene connects to specific traditions and cultures of Sweden, it places itself in the discourse mentioned earlier concerning how any conceptualization of future food cultures needs to take into consideration the cultures and heritage of food practices. “Dear Piece of Meat” understands the value of tradition in relation to food in a way that neither the EAT-Lancet report nor the commission’s website manages to do, and neither of the latter seriously considers the role that food culture has in any transformation toward a more sustainable food future. It is conceivable that the food industry is more aware of these relations than the scientific community, grounded as it is in the commodification of food and because of its genuine awareness of the emotional condition of the people who view its advertisements. What the film suggests, then, is that a gradual transformation toward

126

Chapter 5

a healthier and more sustainable food culture can be executed while retaining the cultures surrounding food. Part of the implicit ecocritical tendencies of the film are the conceptualization of climate catastrophe. The images chosen to represent this—trees falling, a forest fire, and a flood—do not exactly portray these catastrophes in any graphic or potentially upsetting way. They do not explicitly show any victims, and because the images are very brief, their effect does not last. In fact, the first images of trees falling seem to be shown in a slightly slow-motion mode, and although the trees are falling toward the viewers, the aesthetics of the images are really appealing in the same way that the images of the cows that appear later are sublime. The most threating image is that of a forest fire, in which two firefighters are shown with hosepipes in the forest—the reddish orange colors of this shot also create a more heightened sense of alarm. It is worth noting that the narrator decides to comment on this montage. At this point, he deduces that the planet will always be fine (this is confirmed while the film shows an image of a healthy-looking, mostly blue and orange Earth from space), but it is we humans that will suffer. Hence, the message about the climate message still very much communicates an Anthropocene perspective, a choice that probably arose because the film was produced in 2016, when new materialist ideologies concerning erasing distinctions between humans and nonhumans were positioning themselves and later permeating popular climate debates.43 The relatively strong visual focus on children eating situates the advertisement as employing children as classic metaphors in propaganda, in this case to represent planetary futures and to represent what could be at risk if the threats to our planet come to fruition (see the discussion about the use of the boy character in The Road in Chapter 6) (see figure 5.3). We have mentioned the rhythm of the commercial, and it is productive to look more closely at the detail of the editing, especially since rhythm is a medial factor in films that is not inherent in the affordances of more interactive media products such as eatforum​.or​g. What does rhythm do to us? Cinematic rhythm is a consequence of several different aspects: the length of each film clip, the aesthetic construction of each clip (camera placement and perspective, the design of the camera shot, the choice of lens, the movement of the camera), and the juxtaposition between different shots (what Eisenstein and others coined as the montage technique).44 Although rhythm in its extended usage beyond music has gained critical attention, it is impossible to cover its aesthetic history in this chapter. However, for our purpose, it is enough to reiterate that the rhythm underscores the very sense of connectedness with the world in “Dear Piece of Meat.” Pascal Michon, who has comprehensively discussed the topic, suggests that rhythm tends to become a prominent category of reflection at times of rapid social change, and this fits perfectly with our contemporary climate crisis.45

Future Food Cultures

127

Figure 5.3  Children in “Dear Piece of Meat” metaphorically represent planetary futures and what would be at risk in case proper actions are not taken. Source: Coop Sverige, “Kära köttbit,” YouTube, September 15, 2016, 0:25 – 0:26, https://youtu​.be​/XE54YqxrRsE.

An additional component of rhythm, and something we have not yet discussed, is the use of music in the commercial. Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat major, op. 100, second movement, commences one second into the film and is played continuously until the very end of the commercial, becoming an additional audio layer on top of the soft-sounding synchronized sound effects that accompany the images. The emotional impact of the music must not be overlooked; on a basic level, it provides an additional notion of coherence to the specific rhythm of the film. We suggest that this propels a sense that everything in the film comes together in the final shot of the film (also evident in the temporal proceeding from morning to evening), creating a holistic approach to the topics of the individual images that are shown earlier in the commercial: natural disasters, nature, food, animals, farming, food cultures and traditions, health, children, and our planet. The musical piece, combining piano, violin, and cello, operates in the emotional registers of melancholy, headiness, and dignification. The rhythm of the piece is, initially, steady, with a 2/4 beat and a syncope at the end of each bar, and it resembles music used for a funeral march or some kind of procession. This gives the music a slightly eerie sense of determinism; it seems to lead the viewer of the film forward toward something and at the same time creates a sense of doing so in a shared way. What it also does, besides constructing a sense of approaching something and finding an ending, is to accumulate all the information that lingers in the other audiovisual modes along the way. Hence, the holistic sense of the film and its final shot are prepared through the rhythm of the music. The connotation of funeral marches

128

Chapter 5

adds seriousness and gravity, which, although not explicit throughout the advertisement, still signals that the questions raised in the film should be taken seriously. So what rhythm does, besides binding all the diverse shots together, is create a sense of weight to a media type that is generally considered feeble. Even though this weight is partly due to Schubert’s musical construction, the use of a classical piece in itself can potentially bring a certain sincerity to the experience. This is perhaps not a very common piece to use in commercials marketing popular products, although it figures in a series of popular media, most prominently in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon.46 In several films, using Schubert’s Trio is part of constructing a looming tragedy, so one can deduce that the music has a very special affective contamination effect on the viewer, the topics, and the film shots accompanying it.47

COMPARATIVE NOTES In short, then, “Dear Piece of Meat” has it both ways, so to speak. It caters for consumers who are increasingly climate (and health) conscious, but it does not necessarily scare off the more traditional consumers. This ambition should be seen in the context of the larger network of advertising cultures that Coop operates in. There has been an increasing focus in the organization’s television commercials on supporting the green wave (it claims to be Sweden’s greenest supermarket chain), especially through its own organic brand, Änglamark,48 and the commercial must be seen in this wider context. To conclude, let us return to the thematic question that concerns the comparative intermedial and ecocritical analysis: How are ideas about future food cultures represented, and can we draw any preliminary conclusions from them? Steps 2 and 3 have some similarities, but there are more differences in terms of how these two media products relate to the topic. Eatforum​.o​rg has more affordances that are specific to the website as a media type than “Dear Piece of Meat”: interaction, giving users freedom of choice in terms of how they navigate the website, and multimedial qualities. Eatforum​ .o​rg hence satisfactorily invites users to deepen their knowledge of a changed food culture as well as to become actively engaged in sustainable food on many different levels. Eatforum​.o​rg does not shy away from the truth about the climate crisis but in the end provides a hopeful view on the possibility of change if we engage in these questions globally, collectively, and in solidarity. The website is rather uncritical of the complex issues surrounding future food cultures; for example, it does not provide a clear image of what future food will be like, and it does not problematize the relations between culture, tradition, identity, and food. Regarding these latter concerns, the affordances of climate fiction (novels, poetry, and podcasts) and audiovisual media (advertisements,

Future Food Cultures

129

computer games) in particular provide a huge advantage because they allow the creation of advanced multisensory world building. Eatforum​.or​g, however, has a greater impact on creating agency and activism in its users through its interactive possibilities (including the option for the user to act at their own speed and according to their own interests), its knowledge-gathering function, the simple audiovisual experiences it offers, and by inspiring users to create their own initiatives on different levels. The scientific backdrop also provides pragmatic options for turning our climate in a more positive direction and therefore infuses a strong sense of hope and community. Eatforum​.o​rg is inclusive for people from very different backgrounds, but as stated earlier, it builds on a specific scientific result rather than culture and tradition. The risk in doing so is that it becomes overtly didactic and will only speak to those already involved in these debates. “Dear Piece of Meat” does not have the interactive advantages of Eatforum​ .or​g, nor the latter’s more explicit connections to climate and food science. “Dear Piece of Meat” tries to compensate for its perilous transmediation from science to a commercial by using an authoritative narrative voice and providing some basic, scientific facts on climate change. Although it lacks the extended introspective, pedagogical qualities of eatforum​.or​g, it does offer some specific advice about how to participate in the food transformation: gaining knowledge about cooking vegetarian food, replacing meat with vegetables, inviting friends and family to organic vegetarian family dinners, and being part of the collective movement that is aiming for a healthier food culture. From an emotional perspective, the sensorial modalities of primarily audio and visual modes enhance the experience for the viewer and construct, in a mini-format, a climate fiction, or at least a climate narrative. The commercial sides of the advertisement are toned down, and viewers can relate to this commercial on their own terms. The future food cultures sketched by “Dear Piece of Meat” are less specific than in eatforum​.or​g; still, it communicates a first step in the direction of a world in which a heavily meat-based diet is exchanged for a healthier and more sustainable vegetarian diet. The fact that meat is still represented as tasty and locally produced makes this transition less radical but perhaps also more realistic—at least in terms of how the adaptation to sustainable food practices is still rooted in personal identity and cultural heritage.

NOTES 1. Walter Willet et al., “Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems,” The Lancet 393, no. 10170 (January 2019): 448.

130

Chapter 5

2. Tamara Lucas and Richard Horton, “The 21st-Century Great Food Transformation,” The Lancet 393, no. 10170 (January 2019): 386. 3. Lorenzo Cornardo, “WHO Withdraws Endorsement of EAT-Lancet Diet,” Nutrition Insight (2019): NP 4. Harry Harris, “Why a Planetary Health Diet Probably Won’t Save the World,” The New Statesman, 21 January (2019): NP. 5. Claude Fischler, “Food, Self and Identity,” Social Science Information 27, no. 2 (1988): 275, https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/053901888027002005. 6. Pamela Goyan Kittler, Kathryn P. Sucher, and Marcia Nahikian-Nelms, Food and Culture (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2017), 2. 7. Michelle Phillipov, Media and Food Industries: The New Politics of Food (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). 8. Cordula Kropp, Irene Antoni-Komar, and Colin Sage, Food System Transformations: Social Movements, Local Economies, Collaborative Networks (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Naya Jones, “‘It tastes Like Heaven’: Critical and Embodied Food Pedagogy with Black Youth in the Anthropocene,” Policy Futures in Education 17, no. 7 (December 2019): 905–923. 9. Imogen Malpas, “Climate Fiction is a Vital Tool for Producing Better Planetary Futures,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 1: 12–13. 10. Archer Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas, “‘Soper at Oure Aller Cost’: The Politics of Food Supply in the Canterbury Tales,” The Chaucer Review 50, no. 1–2 (2015): 1–29, https://doi​.org​/10​.5325​/chaucerrev​ .50​.1​-2​.0001; Michael Parrish Lee, The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London: Springer, 2016); Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Literary Approaches to Food Studies: Eating the Other,” Food, Culture & Society 8, no. 2 (September 2005): 243–258, https://doi​.org​/10​.2752​/155280105778055326. 11. Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, eds., Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017). 12. Lykke Guanio-Uluru, “Imagining Climate Change: The Representation of Plants in Three Nordic Climate Fictions for Young Adults,” Children’s Literature in Education 51, no. 3 (September 2020): 411–429; Corina Löwe, “Sköna nya värld, men vad ska vi äta?: Matmotivet i framtidsskildringar för barn och unga,” in Didiaktiska perspektiv på hållbarhetsteman i barn- och ungdomslitteratur, eds. Corina Löwe and Åsa Nilsson Skåve (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2020), 60–79; Astrid Bracke, Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Tereso Bothelo, “What Will We Eat? Food as Signifier in the Projection of Futurities in Climate Change Fiction,” in Utopian Foodways: Critical Essays, eds. Teresa Botelho, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, and José Eduardo Reis (University of Porto Press, 2019), 33–48. 13. This is a direct translation of the Swedish Title, “Kära köttbit – vi måste prata.” The Swedish version of the advertisement is the one that is used in this analysis: Coop S­verige, “Kära köttbit,” YouTube, September 15, 2016, https://youtu​ .be​ /XE54YqxrRsE. However, there is an English version of this advertisement too, with the title “Dear Meat”: Coop S­verige, “Dear Meat,” YouTube, September 29, 2016, https://youtu​ .be/​-axWzQK8uqs. This version uses a translated text of the original Swedish advertisement, but the narrator is a young girl instead of a man in the original version.

Future Food Cultures

131

14. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries. 15. Ibid., 1. 16. For an analysis of food in video games, see Agata Waszkiewicz, Delicious Pixels: Food in Games (Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022). 17. Hugh Campbell, “Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory Corporate Environmentalism, Ecological Feedbacks and the ‘Food from Somewhere’ Regime?” Agriculture and Human Values 26, no. 4 (December 2009): 309–319. 18. Ibid. 19. See Michelle Phillipov and Katherine Kirkwood, eds., Alternative Food ­Politics from the Margins to the Mainstream (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 20. Anna Jones, One Pot, One Pan, One Planet: A Greener Way to Cook for You and Your Family (New York, NY: Knopf, 2022); Melissa Hemsley, Eat Green (New York: Random House, 2020), Ollie Hunter, 30 Easy Ways to Join the Food Revolution (Rizzoli New York, 2020); Tom Hunt, Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet (London: Kyle Books, 2020); Jenny Jeffries, For the Love of the Land: A Cook Book to Celebrate British Farmers and their Food (Sheffield: Publishing, 2020) and For The Love of the Land II (Sheffield: Meze Publishing). 21. Chad Lavin, Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Julie Guthman, “Can’t Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos,” Gastronomica 7 (2007): 75–79; Ryanne Pilgeram and Russell Meeuf, “Good Food, Good Intentions: Where Pro-Sustainability Arguments Get Stale in US Food Documentaries,” Environmental Communication 9 (2015): 100–117; Laura B. DeLind, “Are Local Food and the Local Food Movement Taking Us Where We Want to Go? Or Are We Hitching Our Wagons to the Wrong Stars?” Agriculture and Human Values 28 (2011): 273–283. 22. Kate Soper, “Rethinking the ‘Good Life’: The Consumer as Citizen,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 15, no. 3 (2004): 112. 23. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, 29. 24. Parts of this analysis have previously been published in Jørgen Bruhn and Niklas Salmose, “Intermedial ekokritik,” in Ekokritiska metoder, eds. Camilla Brudin Borg, Jørgen Bruhn, and Rikard Wingård (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2022), 233–258. 25. It is worth noting that one of Eatforum.org’s partners is the controversial and world’s largest beverage and food company Nestlé. Eatforum.org is very transparent about this collaboration, and assures that no profit organizations finance their scientific research. 26. James Hannam, “A Brief History of Popular Science: Explaining the World Through the Ages,” in Successful Science Communication, eds. David Bennett and Richard Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37–43. 27. Ibid. 28. For an insightful study of how literary techniques and rhetorical strategies are used to construct and explain science, to represent the universe and humankind’s place in the universe, and to evoke aesthetic and emotional responses in their readers, see Daniel Helsing’s “The Literary Construction of the Universe: Narratives of Truth, Transcendence, and Triumph in Contemporary Anglo-American Popularizations of Physics and Astronomy” (PhD diss., Lund University, 2019).

132

Chapter 5

29. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 30. For a detailed analysis of Silent Spring as a work of popular science and the transmedial aspects of it, see Niklas Salmose, “Three Transmediations of the Anthropocene: An Intermedial Eco-Critical Reading of Facts, Sci-Fi, PopSci and Eco-Horror,” in Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders, eds. Lars Elleström and Niklas Salmose (New York: Routledge, 2020), 254–273. 31. Gunn Enli, Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 1. 32. Read Elisabet Qvarford’s (CEO of Swedish Meat when the film was aired) critique of the commercial here: https://www​.atl​.nu​/coops​-kottreklam​-uppror. Her critique was implicitly refuted by viktorherbivor in his YouTube response, in which he contended that there is no such thing as climate-friendly meat production: https:// www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=​-Ww5stvIGys​&list​=PLu​2UZW​ptBq​vAQB​vTWl​6zP1​ W9aq​9WZqCzg​&index​=12​&ab​_channel​=viktorherbivor. 33. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries. 34. Ibid., 177. 35. Jane Dixon, “Operating Upstream and Downstream: How Supermarkets Exercise Power in the Food System,” in A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, eds. John Germov and Lauren Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 100–123. 36. Campbell, “Breaking New Ground,” 313. 37. Tania Lewis and Alison Huber, “A Revolution in an Eggcup? Supermarket Wars, Celebrity Chefs, and Ethical Consumption,” Food, Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (June 2015): 294, 299. 38. EAT, https://eatforum​.org/. 39. Signe Kjær Jensen and Martin Knust, “Media and Modalities—Music,” in Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, eds. Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher (London: Routledge, 2022), 61. 40. Gian Lorenzo Cornado, quoted in Laxmi Haigh, ed., “WHO Withdraws Endorsement of EAT-Lancet Diet,” Nutrition Insight, https://www​.nutritioninsight​ .com​/news​/who​-withdraws​-endorsement​-of​-eat​-lancet​-diet​.html; Harry Harris, “Why a Planetary Health Diet Probably Won’t Save the World,” New Statesman, January 21, 2019, https://www​.newstatesman​.com​/politics​/health​/2019​/01​/why​-planetary​ -health​-diet​-probably​-won​-t​-save​-world. 41. This image occurred in an earlier version of the website, and has recently been removed as the CO-CREATE section has been expanded significantly. The omission of this image might diminish the effect of this project. 42. As mentioned earlier, the English language version of this commercial is narrated by a young girl, which obviously gives the whole advertisement an entirely different emotional frame. 43. Dominic Pettman, Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana

Future Food Cultures

133

University Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ontology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 44. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and the Film Sense: Two Complete and Unabridged Works (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). 45. Pascal Michon, Rythmes, Pouvoir, Mondialisation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 17. 46. Schubert’s music is also used in The Hunger, Crimson Tide, The Piano Teacher, L’Homme de sa vie, Land of the Blind, Recollections of the Yellow House, The Way He Looks, The Mechanic, Miss Julie, The Congress, the HBO miniseries John Adams, the FX miniseries Mrs. America, and two episodes of American Crime Story, and is the opening piece of the ABC documentary The Killing Season; it is also used throughout the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and “The Final Solution.” 47. The second movement by Schubert is based on a Swedish folk song, “Se solen sjunker” [Watch the sun set]. Although very few viewers would know this, it is fascinating to speculate about how the temporal progression of the commercial moves toward the night scene at the end and how this can be seen as a metaphorical warning for the climate emergency that might resonate between the original folk song and the emotional perception of the second movement. 48. Their celebrated and prize-winning commercial, The Restaurant, is noteworthy: a man wearing protective overalls uses a hand-operated pressure sprayer to spray pesticides onto the plates of customers in a restaurant, claiming that it is not poison—and that science has proven that it is not at all dangerous: https://youtu​.be​/nGGhZUbwpOk.

Chapter 6

Roads to Ecological Agency

The main objective of this chapter is to investigate how the two media products, The Road, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy, and the subsequent 2009 eponymous film adaptation by John Hillcoat, negotiate the concept of ecological agency (see the discussion of this concept in chapter 2). Since this is not an empirical study, the comparative, intermedial, and ecocritical readings of these two media products will necessarily be speculative in nature. However, it is clear that in order to ground a basic understanding of how different media types offer engagements with art consumers in terms of ecology and agency, this method has a lot to offer and positions itself in a crucial contemporary reality; more specifically, how does art affect our opinions on the climate emergency and our will to act in response to it? The decision to compare a novel and a film, two related media types, was made precisely because of their similarities. We want to demonstrate that a rigorous intermedial analysis of The Road and its filmic adaptation has much to say about how the climate crisis is mediated in artistic media when the narrative is informed by the tropes of climate fiction. The aim is therefore to distinguish how the two most popular media types for climate fiction work in terms of creating an impact. This chapter only works in the framework of adaptation studies in the specific sense of how these two media products construct impact potentials; of course, this has to do with concepts such as, in Robert Stam’s words, “adaptation as reading, rewriting, critique, translation, transmutation, metamorphosis, recreation, transvocalization, resuscitation, transfiguration, actualization, transmodalization, signifying, performance, dialogization, cannibalization, reinvisioning, incarnation, or reaccentuation.”1 It is therefore adequate to frame this adaptation in Thomas Leitch’s category of a curatorial approach in the sense that adaptations “impute to their literary sources powers beyond their own [to] preserve their original texts as faithfully as possible.”2 135

136

Chapter 6

Choosing two media products that have this kind of adaptive relationship should be understood as an attempt to more distinctly qualify the different media types’ and different potentials, since they are based on the same basic plot. This means that the narrative is less important than the aesthetics involved in realizing it. So this intermedial ecocritical reading of ecological agency in the two media products is less about transformation and more about comparison. The chapter initially introduces the reader to a general intermedial discussion of the two media products before the comparative analysis. In the Coda, the results of this analysis will be complemented with a brief discussion about a third media product that shares similar qualified media aspects with the film and the novel examined in this chapter: the computer game The Climate Trail.3

STEP 1: ROAD(S) AND ECOLOGICAL AGENCY In an exclusive interview on prime-time television with Oprah Winfrey, Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road (2006), revealed what had initiated the postapocalyptic dream manifested in his novel: My son John, about four years ago, he and I went to El Paso . . . and we checked into the old hotel there and one night (John was asleep) .  .  . and I just stood and looked out of the window at this town . . . I just had an image of what this town might look like in fifty or a hundred years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hills and everything being laid waste and I thought a lot about my little boy.4

It is inconceivable not to be touched by how McCarthy’s fictional future is entangled with and generated by his affection toward his own family. Imaging future disasters through the conceptualization of impending time as a child is not rare, by any means. Children (or the lack of them) function, albeit symbolically, as an emotional catalyst in the science fiction film Children of Men.5 Children also play an essential part in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel and the subsequent television and opera adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale, in the 2005 novel Never Let Me Go (teens) by Kazuo Ishiguro, and in Madame Nielsen’s Pentagon smeltet.6 A child, obviously, is also an effective narrative device for attracting sentimentality; Chaplin’s The Kid, for example, is usually considered his most heartbreaking film.7 The parent-child relationship depicted in the latter film creates a parallel bond with viewers that enhances the role of the child not only as an emblematic child but also as an intimate realization of the viewer’s personal genetic future. Because the

Roads to Ecological Agency

137

viewer identifies with the love of the child, the impact of the drama attains a heightened emotional mode. In the same way, McCarthy’s father-son narrative creates opportunities for emotional attachments that carry the story from future fiction into present reality. These sentiments are carried further by how the narration of most of the novel focuses on the perspective of the father, simulating an adult reader’s private concerns even though the true protagonist of the story is the son, in terms of how he represents the future of humanity, or perhaps even the first generation of a new branch of humans on Earth. The actual plot line of the novel is modest: a father and his son travel on foot to the southern coast of the US (vaguely recognizable through signs and advertisements), seeking a place more hopeful than the one they travel through. A few months before the boy’s birth, an apocalyptic event had ended civilization and scorched the entire planetary ecology, leaving behind a vast cloud enveloping Earth. Even though years have passed since that event, the son has never seen the sun, the moon, the stars, or living plants and animals. Father and son wear masks to filter the pervasive ash particulate that is a residual hazard of the disaster. Hence, the affective strength of the novel lies in its execution of a discourse rather than in its narrative—in its way of showing the story. The odd punctuation (lack of citation marks and certain apostrophes) signals on a linguistic level the divergence between past and future that is the rupture of postapocalyptic fiction; language is reminiscent of pre-cataclysmic communication, but still with something lost. The general impact of the novel, we argue, stems from McCarthy’s narratological and stylistic choices, the way he builds the setting of his diminished biospheric desert landscape, and the use of a parent-child relationship as a narrative driving force.8 Several critics acknowledged the environmental importance of the novel when it was published, ascribing to its significant and important impact on ecological debates. Hannah Stark underscores the view that The Road has a “strong didactic function, [and] can be read as a warning about impending environmental catastrophe.”9 The strongest evocation of the novel’s importance came from George Monbiot, a climate journalist and activist: A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.10

The Road is usually categorized as belonging within the broad genre of climate fiction (cli-fi), which both Stark and Monbiot do, even though the

138

Chapter 6

specific fictional background leading up to the global cataclysm that initiates the narration of the novel is never revealed. The novel situates itself in the submedium (or genre) of postapocalyptic fiction, which is a common generic narrative form for ecological debates and the consequences of ecological and climate disaster. Postapocalyptic fiction differs from apocalyptic fiction in that its focus is on a changed world that exists after some kind of cataclysm, whereas apocalyptic fiction describes the actual apocalypse or the immediate events leading up to it. The emotional tone and the impact of the two submedia are thus very different: in postapocalyptic cli-fi, the sensationalism and often blockbuster qualities used to expose the catastrophes that are seen in apocalyptic cli-fi are replaced with a more reflective storyworld that is about building the framework of a life in a changed habitus. As Stark argues, The Road should be seen “as an allegorical projection of the anxieties present in the cultural Zeitgeist, filtered through climate-change discourse. In particular, The Road can be interpreted as reflecting anxieties about extreme weather events, deforestation, species’ extinction, and food shortages.”11 In addition, the ethical and environmental broodings that ooze out of the novel are a careful yet explicit engagement with present discussions during the Anthropocene, more specifically discussions about the role of the human, the Anthropos. The novel was rather quickly adapted into a film by John Hillcoat in 2009, and it took its place in a succession of several earlier eco-apocalyptic films such as The Day After Tomorrow, Children of Men, and Avatar.12 As Terence McSweeney illustrates, these films were a reaction to the “turbulent geopolitical climate of the first decade of the new millennium” in the same manner as a number of science fiction films made in the 1950s and 1960s were a reaction to the Cold War ideologies of those decades.13 The essential difference between, on the one hand, the contemporary films and the science fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s and, on the other, The Road (film) (and this difference is similar in relation to the original novel too) is, as Billy J. Stratton significantly observes, the absent representation of “the apocalyptic hyperobject” (see the definition of hyperobject in chapter 2) in The Road (film).14 While the novel received positive reviews, much criticism, and, later, was scrutinized by academics,15 the film had a short circulation period in theaters in the United States and generally had negative reviews. And the film has not been as much of a focus for academic analyses as the novel it originates from. Alexa Weik von Mossner places the film in the genre of speculative fiction in “Afraid of the Dark and the Light: Visceralizing Ecocide in The Road and Hell.” She argues that “science fiction is in a near‐ideal position to explore perceived risks and anxieties regarding large‐scale environmental change. Science fiction film, with its ability to visualize and visceralize speculative future worlds, is particularly powerful in this regard.”16 Weik von Mossner

Roads to Ecological Agency

139

also observes how the film’s setting becomes an “active agent and part of the action.”17 The most crucial element here is the framing of the film within the visceral, which points to how Weik von Mossner reads the film as an embodied and sensorial experience that requires a lower cognitive engagement than would perhaps be the case with the novel. Anne Gjelsvik also mentions the film in “What Novels Can Tell That Movies Can’t Show” and asks why the most disturbing scene of the novel (the cannibal scene) was removed from the film; she assumes this was done because it was believed it would be too disturbing to watch.18 This is in line with her claim that cinema is better suited to including graphically violent narration than novels due to the audiovisual, emotional, and sensorial qualities of film as a media type. The qualifying aspects are also important: circulating a film in the US market in terms of the rating system, demands that less graphic violence be included. Hence, there are plain commercial reasons for omitting certain violent scenes from the novel. Work that explicitly and extensively discusses the relation between the film and the novel is scarce. Stratton studies the adaptation of the novel to film but predominantly focuses on the film through a brilliant aesthetic reading of it, particularly regarding the spatiotemporal constructions of placelessness in the film.19 Fiona Macmillan considers both the novel and the film, but only as an accumulated narrative in her analysis of how expressive autonomy and law form political and social organization.20 Stacey Peebles is more interested in the concrete relationship between the novel and the film.21 She meticulously discusses the novel and then the film, and in the latter section, she reads the film with the novel in mind. The result is a convincing, but not very theoretical, reading of how the film adapts certain aspects of the novel: it uses flashbacks, CGI technology is not used to simulate disaster settings, the theological discourses and religious imagery are reduced in the film, and, very deliberately, the role of the mother is changed. The article also discusses the contexts of adaptations in general and the adaptation of The Road specifically, and it is hard to draw distinctive conclusions from Peebles’ analysis. Although Peebles engages in ecocriticism to some degree, Stratton and MacMillan barely touch on this, and none of these authors’ works address ecological agency or impact.

STEP 2: THE SPECIFICITIES OF THE TWO MEDIA PRODUCTS From an intermedial perspective, both novels and films have a chronological temporal mode within the spatiotemporal modality (which is the opposite of having the option to tell the plot in temporally complex ways, e.g., through

140

Chapter 6

flashbacks, for example): we mostly watch films and read books in a linear way. This is pseudo-theoretical in the sense that a consumer can, of course, choose to read the pages in a different order than the material suggests or can jump from scene to scene randomly while watching a film. In addition, the spatial dimensions of films and novels, unless we watch the film in 3D, are quite similar in terms of their material qualities; they are two-dimensional flat surfaces. The differences between the two media types occur mostly in the other three modalities and in how the specific media products are qualified. Films communicate through a variety of technical devices of display: cell phones, tablets, computers, video projectors, and cinema projectors. The material modality of books can be paper or a diverse set of digital formats such as audiobooks, tablets, or multimedia devices. The technical device of the display and the material modality of the media product definitely affect the experience of the media product and also have an impact on what the context of consumption looks like. The emotional impact on a viewer, for example, would be significantly different if they watched a film in a crowded cinema compared to watching it on a train on their handheld device. In addition, there are material differences between holding and turning the pages of a paperback and clicking on an e-reader, and although they are perhaps not as substantial as the example of watching a film in different contexts, they are still significant.22 Reading also involves changed modes within the sensorial modality: although reading is always both visual and auditive,23 the focus on each mode is changed if you consume an audiobook rather than an ordinary book. The haptic experience of these different technical devices of display is also different, in terms of holding the display, feeling its weight, and touching it. Film’s multimodal complexity, especially its angulation of sound (its diegetic and nondiegetic voice, sound effects, and music) and its nonsymbolic visuality, set it apart from the novel—with the exception of illustrated novels or the material on the cover. The meaning-making process that occurs in the semiotic modality occurs simultaneously with a sense data input that takes place through the sensorial and spatiotemporal modalities. The level of semiotic activity is different, as will be shown next, when a novel or a film is being experienced. One could argue that semiosis (in the cognitive sense) is more foregrounded in the basic medium of written text, since it inherently involves more cognitive processes (e.g., filling in the gaps) than an audiovisual medium such as film. As argued by many critics, film, on the other hand, operates more within concepts of affect and embodiment. This can be explained by how a novel’s sign system is mostly symbolic, whereas a film’s is indexical and, to a lesser degree, iconical. Hence, the cognitive process that occurs when a novel is being read works by creating a complex storyworld

Roads to Ecological Agency

141

that has the contours of an indexed world, whereas a film provides these contours immediately through its specific semiotic affordances. These rather minor medial differences still have an essential impact on how we interpret and feel the media product through the semiotic modality. This, in turn, effect how we respond to these media in terms of ecological agency. In order to facilitate a simplified comparative analysis between the two Roads in this chapter, we will not delve into the specific technical device of display or the material differences between different submedia material products (e.g., we can read a novel as a paperback or on a tablet, or listen to it via an audiobook, and we can watch a film on our phone or in a home cinema). However, it is highly relevant to remember that paratextual aspects of the technical device of display matter and affect the experience and expectations of these works. For example, the cover of the first edition hardcover version of The Road is completely black and is only interrupted by the name of the author toward the upper left corner and the title of the book in a blood-red font toward the lower right. The minimalistic cover communicates seriousness (in line with what is generally required for a book to qualify as a novel) and danger (the title evokes horror novels). In short, there is a general emotional aura of some kind of emergency that emanates from the cover and that reflects some very basic concerns in the novel. In addition, the dark background suggests the darkness of humanity. Depending on the technical device of display and the material accompanying the media product as well as the material promoting it, the film will display different types of paratexts or epiphenomena: DVD covers, cinema posters (different kinds), and images in streaming services. However, none of these different representations will frame the plot in the same imaginative way as the book cover, since, as part of the submedium qualifications of contemporary cinema, the advertising material need to adhere, indexically, to the actual film: indexical images of a father and son are situated in a postapocalyptic landscape in all the items just mentioned. Finally, these two media products do not just float around in medial space. Several contextual issues influence how we relate to them, and in intermedial terms, we call these qualifications of the media types. These can be basic contexts, such as the respective histories of cinema and the novel, and how these two media types are qualified in the specific contexts of the geography and timing of their respective productions.24 Configured by critics as both cli-fi and postapocalyptic narratives, they carry a set of genre-related expectations that these two submedia disclose. These in turn disseminate predeterminations that affect the actual experience of the media products. As noted elsewhere in this book, it is important to situate individual media products in the larger ecological discourses (scientific, popular, educational, and activist) that consist of complex sets of mediations and transmediations. At an elemental

142

Chapter 6

level, these two Roads-narratives demonstrate media transformations of scientific media concerning the climate emergency into more speculative and imaginative media types (see chapter 3 for a more detailed description of this process). For the purposes of an analysis of ecological agency, it is sufficient to state that the knowledge, interests, and previous experiences of real-time environmental events and/or climate discourses play a significant part in how we relate to the content and aesthetics of the two Road-narratives. General Differences Between the Novel and the Film The following section functions as a brief overview of some established critical positions regarding how the two different media types diverge. The critical material referred to here has been selected primarily in view of how the differences between the novel and the film are important in our analysis of the level of impact of each media product. In recent cognitive studies, as well as in affect studies, there is a common view that cinema is much more powerful than literature because of its supplementary visual, auditive, iconical, and indexical emulations (i.e., its low level of mediated reality). Yet, as many critics and students believe, the novel The Road is more forceful than the film version, and strikingly so. Hence, it is important to summarize the long and arduous history of criticism of film versus novel that has emerged in the past five decades or so. Our choice of source material, which may sometimes seem unusual or even radical, has been made in the light of what we consider to be important to our intermedial ecocritical analysis of ecological agency. Seymour Chatman’s seminal essay “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t” is a possible starting point for discussing the differences between novel and film, with a focus on the commonly depicted “superiority” of novel over film.25 Chatman observes that film only depicts (that is, it does not assert or describe), and hence stresses a limitation of film from which a literary text does not suffer.26 For instance, tone and evaluative descriptions seem to be possible only in literature, and Chatman notes, quite condescendingly, that the “camera (poor thing) is unable to invoke tone.”27 Another point addressed by Chatman is perspective, and he states that writers always have greater flexibility than filmmakers in this regard. According to him, “the visual point of view in a film is always there: it is fixed and determinate precisely because the camera always needs to be placed somewhere.”28 The cognitive intricacies involved in reading fiction are usually attributed to the media type’s superiority in triggering mental activities, fostering fantasy, and involving the reader, thereby creating an intimate experience closely connected to the reader’s own mental and biographical status.29 We are often told that reading is important, and this has recently been supported by cognitive

Roads to Ecological Agency

143

neuroscience. Reading engages language-processing areas of the left temporal cortex—these parts of the brain decode words, access the meaning of words, follow syntax (grammar), parse phrases, and create meaning. And imagery and visualization in the parietal cortex are involved to a greater extent than when we are watching a movie, which supplies us with visuals.30 As a second-level language skill, reading (and writing) is not automatically acquired. It requires specialized cognitive skills and must be practiced through teaching and learning activities.31 This can perhaps be related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that a novel has an authoritative voice due to the internal, persuasive voice of both the narrator and the narratee.32 In addition, the authoritative discourse is connected to the qualification of literature as serious and complex—an institution that represents what could be described as a kind of authority. The most recent work has tried to explain the advantages that film has as a medium, and supposedly this perspective represents a desire to both explain and promote the moving image turn. Gjelsvik argues, as mentioned earlier, that film evokes a much stronger emotional response than literature, especially when it comes to representations of violence.33 “First,” she writes, “cinema is commonly understood as the art of the visual and of vision.”34 Thus, according to her, cinema endows the viewer with the role of a witness. This idea leads her to the second argument—to “the idea that the medium [of cinema] is immediate,” that is, close, and that “it is hard for the spectator to distance herself from [it].”35 This point made by Gjelsvik is related to the cognitive work of Vittorio Gazelle and Michele Guerra.36 They touch upon the so-called “reality effect” that movies produce: this concept describes the fact that “the continuity between perceiving scenes in movies and in the world, as the dynamics of attention, spatial cognition and action are very similar in direct experience and mediated experience.”37 Hence, violence in cinema becomes closer to one’s reality through film’s indexical status as a media type, but this is also made possible by how cinema’s limited use of different perspectives and the traditional editing of classic Hollywood put the viewer in the role of a witness. This is something that Adrian J. Ivakhiv sets out to explore: how and why films (moving images) “have changed the way we grasp and attend to the world . . . of social and ecological relations.”38 Ivakhiv argues that cinema, of all the modern art forms, “comes closest to depicting reality itself, because reality is always in motion, always in process of becoming. Cinema not only mirrors and represents reality but also shadows, extends, reshapes, and transforms it.”39 An attempt to emotionalize cinema is developed further by Weik von Mossner, who mainly focuses on the concept of foregrounding (building on work by David S. Miall and Don Kuiken40) and on cinematic mood: In the literary realm, foregrounding involves linguistic and stylistic features that guide reader attention. In case of film, cinematography, lighting, mise-en-scene,

144

Chapter 6

editing, and sound design, together with a range of effects that are added during postproduction, all crucially influence how viewers perceive a given scene.41

She proposes studying two functions of cinematic environments. The first function is their function as “mood cues”42: “Filmmakers frequently use the environment that surrounds a character to set general mood for a certain scene or sequence, thereby preparing the viewer for stronger and more immediate bursts of emotion.”43 The second function of cinematic environments is that “in some, if not all, films the diegetic space is not so much the passive setting for action (or an autonomous landscape) as it is an active agent and thus part of the action.”44 Weik von Mossner’s notion of mood cues has some support in the cognitive sciences; Patrick Colm Hogan, for example, gives an overview of cognitive literary theories that aim to explore the brain’s responses to a literary text. Although Hogan does not explicitly compare literature and cinema, he writes that “[w]hile literature (apparently) must forego the ‘low road’ of direct emotive simulation, movies involve subcortical emotive arouses all the time.”45 According to cognitive scholar Carl Plantinga, meaning-making in a movie should not be isolated from the affective experience the movie offers: the two are “firmly intertwined.”46 He argues that first and foremost film is a sensual media whose power resides in its direct appeal to viewers’ sight and hearing.47 One of Weik von Mossner’s main claims, especially when she is discussing cinema from an ecocritical perspective, is that cinema allows embodied experiences in a more intensive way than literature, through its strong sensorial potentials (these experiences would include spatiotemporal ones).48 She bases her ideas about the embodiment of cinema on those of several prominent film critics, perhaps most predominantly on the work of Laura Marks. Marks explores how cinematic works are able to evoke individual and cultural memories “through an appeal to nonvisual knowledge, embodied knowledge, and experiences of the senses, such as touch, smell, and taste.”49 Particular images, Marks believes, imply a haptic visuality, or, put differently, “invite the viewer to respond to the image in an intimate, embodied way, and thus facilitate the experience of other sensory impressions as well.”50 In adaptation studies, there have been many debates on the divergences between the two media types, but they are perhaps somewhat limited. George Bluestone, for example, begins his 1957 study of adaptation by emphasizing the difference between verbal images, which involve conceptual thinking, and visual images, which are perceived rather than conceived, and by announcing that “between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the visual image lies the root difference between the two media.”51 More recently, theorists have been wary of making such an absolute distinction between (so-called) verbal and visual media. W. J. T. Mitchell contends that

Roads to Ecological Agency

145

“the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no ‘purely’ visual or verbal arts.”52 Kamilla Elliott argues that “visual/verbal categorizations break down at every level in the hybrid arts of illustrated novels and worded films: at the level of the whole arts, at the level of the whole signs, and at the level of pieces of signs.”53 It is also our argument that the combinations of media should not be hierarchized at face level and that all basic media or qualified media types that are integrated in complex media types, such as film, need to be seen holistically and in an integrated form.

STEP 3: INTERMEDIAL ANALYSIS OF THE TWO ROADS Even though the film adaptation of the novel The Road is, to use Leitch’s term, a curatorial adaptation and hence, at least at plot level, respectful and faithful to the novel, there are significant differences between the two.54 These differences, we argue, can significantly affect how impactful these fictions are for an audience in terms of their ecological agency and how different the impact can be. Some of these variations are also related to the affordances of their respective media types. Notable differences include the spatial constructions, the use of different narrative perspectives, the different intertexts and allusions, the role of the mother, and how the reconstruction of a fictional past operates through dialogue and flashbacks. One specific detail that stands out in recent criticism of The Road and its adaptation is the difference in how the two media products end. There have already been discussions about how the ending of The Road is different from the endings of McCarthy’s previous novels. Inger-Anne Søfting goes as far as claiming that “the master of anti-sentimentality and of the gruesome has gone soft,” sharing her astonishment “that the boy is still alive at the end of the book.”55 The consensus is that the ending of the novel is “a coda of haunting beauty,” but nobody seems quite sure what to make of the ending.56 Ashley Kunsa notes how the ending hums with mystery. Some find these final lines suggestive of renewal, though only vaguely.57 Others contend that it does little to ameliorate the novel’s pessimism.58 And some find that it offers both a lamentation and “a small promise of hope,”59 is “strangely uplifting,”60 and “a recognition of what we have not yet lost, but still may.”61 The ending will therefore be the focal point of the comparative analysis. This is not only because here we see several differences between the novel and the film, differences that are the consequence of medial differences, but also because endings have a specific role to play in terms of impact: the ending of fiction is usually what we take with us out of the experience.62 Impact can be defined as something that lives on in the reader/audience that forces

146

Chapter 6

them to engage with their fictional experience once it is over. This is exactly what Stratton argues about the ending of the two Roads: The acceptance of the optimistic denouement both McCarthy and Hillcoat employ, however, is dependent upon the viewer’s willingness to travel beyond the discontinuity of this final scene, and further still, beyond those placeless simulations of the “vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming,” to those long lost “maps and mazes” where only the mystery of being can lead us out from the brutal realities that await on the road.63

Let us have a closer look at these novelistic and cinematic maps and mazes. The Novel The novel ends with the following passage: He walked back into the woods and knelt beside his father. He was wrapped in a blanket as the man had promised and the boy didnt [sic] uncover him but he sat beside him and he was crying and he couldnt [sic] stop. He cried for a long time. I’ll talk to you every day, he whispered. And I wont [sic] forget. No matter what. Then he rose and turned and walked back out to the road. The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt [sic] forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.64

The ending of the novel is surprisingly pastoral, rather than apocalyptic, especially in the final paragraph. The style of writing is very bare and minimalized, as it is in the novel as a whole; it is almost reminiscent of the hardboiled tradition of writing in American early crime fiction—it has an earthy realism. As Eleanor Smith argues, because of the style of the novel, its free, indirect discourse, its limitations in perspective, and its stripped-down use “of superfluous words and punctuation, the language of The Road is as sparse as the landscape it describes.”65

Roads to Ecological Agency

147

The sparse prose and the lack of firm sentimental or dramatic effects underscore Slavoj Žižek’s view: “once the catastrophe occurs, it is ‘renormalized,’ perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always already having been possible.”66 Although the novel is occupied with the past through flashbacks, allusions, and intertexts, the action of the story is fundamentally positioned in the present as part of its narrative style. We would argue that this affects how a reader is potentially drawn into the presence of the postapocalypse and is allowed to sense and feel it in an explicit and barely mediated way. The low-key writing thus reflects a desolate world that does not include much nonhuman activity; it is an emotional, cold place. Much has been said about the fact that McCarthy does not specify the actual cataclysm that has pushed the world to the bleak position he describes in his novel. The sometimes matter-of-fact prose of the novel, again, draws attention to real life in the postapocalyptic era but does not dramatize the actual event that caused the apocalypse, which would be the most common way of narrating a story like this. Still, although the characters are not concerned about the histories surrounding the catastrophe, the very omission of this, in combination with the style of writing, engages the reader in speculation about the causes. What this means, in terms of impact, is that readers will brood on their own fears and understandings of the contemporary geopolitical potential for destruction. Hence, the lack of specificity invites readers to fill in that gap with the contexts surrounding them, privately, socially, and politically.67 This speculative reading act is also a result of the temporal aspect of reading, in which readers have the opportunity to drift away, pause, be introspective, and even, perhaps, interact with the novel through discussions, debates, and flashes of reality. In addition, the novel does not operate in the realms of dramatic identification, even though the boy is effectively used as a marker for what is to be lost. As critics have stressed, the novel’s ending (not only the final paragraph) creates a positive, or at least hopeful, denouement. The father dies, and so does the novel’s focalization from his point of view, and his life passes on to his son (as does the novel’s perspective). The optimism of the ending is not only emphasized by the survival of the boy and the embracing of him into the social construction of a family of mixed sexes, which suggests the potential for breeding new humans, but also by the temporal change from a particular scene into a summary in the penultimate paragraph: “She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget.”68 The combination of a reference to the future (which is also shown in the grammar) and a summarizing duration (in Genette’s terminology) of the narration significantly communicates the possibilities of at least human survival, even though this may not extend to humans flourishing. These sudden and subtle changes in the narration’s temporalities and durations are only possible in fictional writing, where

148

Chapter 6

they become fine-tuning narrative instruments that are used to reconnect us with our own present and future anxieties. Nevertheless, the use of “would talk” suggests that this time is perhaps not really in the diegetic future at all but in the hopeful future of characters and readers, and that it takes the form of something that opens up a space for hope even though it is simultaneously denied that hope from a fictional point of view. This suggestion occurs as the narration turns into a dream mode, which carries on to the final coda. On the other hand, the ending can be seen as conservative; it reformulates the future of humans as existing in a nuclear family unit that has intimacy but is also isolated. Further, it positions the Anthropocene subjects within a typical Western context. “What is evident in The Road,” Stark writes, “is the persistence of the ideology of liberal humanism. The anthropocentrism of The Road privileges the perspective of a certain type of human who is male, apparently white, evokes Christian mythology, and was once middle class.”69 One could argue, though, that this ideology forces us to visualize the fact that the climate crisis has indeed been caused by a privileged group of imperialists and capitalists, and that even the middle class will eventually fall prey to disaster. Coda is an appropriate term for a section at the end of something, such as a novel, that unambiguously stands outside the spatiotemporal construction of fictive space.70 At least, that is how a literary coda could be defined. What such a definition does, in the context of the content of the coda of The Road (that is, in relation to nonhuman activities), is to separate the human from the nonhuman even more than has been the case in the history of the Anthropocene. This can seem like a paradox: that in the end it is not about attempting to erase the humanist, long-lasting dichotomy between human and nonhuman but rather about accepting the loss of humans altogether. The latter element is situated in current posthumanist discourses concerning speculations about the prospect of a future without humans.71 In that sense, the coda is a rupture on different levels: on a narrative level (the fictional space of the main narrative versus the unhinged space and time of the coda), on an Anthropocene level (erasure of the human versus nonhuman dichotomies and a stark contrast between the poverty of the biosphere and the animated life), and on a temporal level (narrative time versus deep time). Paying critical attention to loss and conflicting temporalities is specifically related to the third level. Adeline Johns-Putra eloquently writes that the coda “create[s] a stark relief between what humanity has lost and what that loss looks like.”72 She goes on to say that “[t]he vivid description of brook trout that ends the book, apparently apropos of nothing, is a paean to nonhuman ecology that comes as a relief and a eulogy after the devastation of the novel.”73 In a sense, the simple and often unnoticed beauties of the world we occupy are a relief, perhaps because of the very oversight of the Anthropogenic perspective. Still, as Johns-Putra

Roads to Ecological Agency

149

frames it, this is also an absolute loss—a loss of humans, and a human loss. The diminishment of the Anthropos is also accentuated by Smith: McCarthy’s giddying final passage uses language to juxtapose the very small and very large to deliver this ultimate message of his novel, one which reminds us of something much bigger and more ancient than global human systems: the mystery of nature, of biota, and life forms; a mystery which dwarfs human knowledge.74

The contrast between the very small and the very large suggests deep or geological time, a timescale that extends beyond the human.75 As Smith recognizes, this stretched time evokes a sense of a beginning: “The coda constituting the final passage of McCarthy’s novel attests to the revelatory scope of stories as it sweeps out to the mode of fables, with its opening words, ‘Once there were . . ..’”76 The authority that surrounds literature, as Robert Stam argues, is related to the status of the book and its author.77 This can also explain, partly, the lack of balance in the academic critique relating to the novel and the film. Because of the literary prizes that McCarthy won and his highly esteemed career, a mark of quality is put on the product, which also influences the reader’s experience. The setup between author and reader constructs a direct one-to-one communication that makes them intimately bound to each other, with the only mediating element being the letter symbols on the page. This pseudo-intimacy functions as a human dialogue that allows the reader to have a different register of emotional introspection and interpretation. What we are trying to say here is that critically acclaimed literature automatically opens up the potential for impact and influence, as well as a set of expectations, due to its qualified aspects as literature. In film, which is a collaborative art form, identification with the film often appears in a less intimate and intricate way. The Film Ann E. Kaplan contrasts the “hypnotic quality of McCarthy’s language that captures the reader’s attention” with how in the film it is the “fear for the protagonist’s life that keeps the viewers engaged.”78 This is a comment that has everything to do with media format: the novel, through its convoluted use of language and ambiguity, engages through an identified mood and atmosphere, whereas the dramaturgy of film necessitates an identification with a protagonist. In this specific case, one could argue that the film The Road is more narrative than the novel, dependent as it is on dramatic movement rooted in the conventions of cinema. Obviously, cinema as such can defer from that convention and can focus, like a novel, on mood; a great example of this in a similar genre is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) (also an

150

Chapter 6

adaptation of a novel), in which the narrative action is minimized in favor of an emotional ambience, but this kind of filmmaking is hard to realize within the financial realities of today’s cinema.79 This is not to say that Hillcoat’s adaptation is conventional, only that it has to conform to the globalization of mainstream cinema, which has consequences for what the film can and cannot do, as we will see later in this section. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, one important difference between literature and film is that literature is much more flexible with constructive, complex, and multiple perspectives, whereas in film, mostly, the perspective is that of the camera. As Stark notices, the literary narrative of The Road is “largely focalized through the man, and is therefore inescapably anthropocentric.”80 This might not affect the reader directly, unless the reader is very well acquainted with the critique of anthropocentrism in current ecological debates. In such cases, the film’s more neutral narrative point of view (technically at least) could potentially allow the reader to access storytelling that is less anthropocentric—in theory. In addition to only having the camera’s point of view in film, audiences might feel less engaged with the characters (even if they identify with them) and regard them more in terms of being witnesses. This is what Stratton argues, stressing how, [h]igh and low camera angles, interspersed with tracking shots that dolly with and behind the ragged pair while they push a battered shopping cart loaded with scavenged supplies along the road, place the audience in the position of following witnesses.81

Most critical discussions of the film have engaged, unsurprisingly, with its visual qualities, which is what Stratton’s observation does. Stratton spotlights the stark panoramic shots, the absence of CGI and other cinematic effects, the palette of colors in the film, and the juxtaposition between long shots and close-ups.82 The effect of this, according to Stratton, is that “Hillcoat dissolves the conventional oppositions between civilization and wilderness, individual and community, place and placelessness in a way that negates the novel’s imagistic abstraction through the staging of authentic visual representations.”83 This then has the consequence that audiences are propelled to reimagine, nostalgically, the “serene rural landscape positioned in implicit contrast with the contamination of techno-industrial society” (see figures 6.1 and 6.2).84 In line with this conclusion, Weik von Mossner also builds a case for how viewers of the film understand how dependent their own lives are on a healthy environment and how rapidly their lives will change if the environment changes.85 The “wintry palette” and the underexposed film stock that suggests limited sunlight through its low contrast grant the film what Weik von Mossner articulates as its visceral (embodied) quality.86 Although the prose of the novel, as we have discussed, also has the capacity to evoke a strong presence,

Roads to Ecological Agency

151

Figure 6.1  The nostalgic memories about utopian suburbs—the first and only colorful images in The Road, Directed by John Hillcoat (2929 Productions, 2009). Source: The Road (film).

Figure 6.2  The representation of the contaminated techno-industrial society in The Road (film). Source: The Road (film).

arguably cinema is more effective in creating a purely physical, sensorial, and embodied experience of a situation or an atmosphere. It is this visceral quality, Weik von Mossner argues, that influences agency in terms of how viewers feel uncomfortable through Hillcoat’s foregrounding of the close relationship between humans and the nonhuman world and thus need to act or react.87 Specifically, the descriptions of the way that Viggo Mortensen (the actor who plays the father) mimics things, the look of his face, and his fear for the life of his son will make every parent in the audience “relate to some of his emotions and empathize or sympathize with his desperate situation.”88 Hence, the use of the child in relation to the parent as well as the minimal use of dialogue create an emotional rather than an intellectual bond to the symbol of human life and the future: the boy.

152

Chapter 6

Toward the end of the film, as with many other adaptations, the film is a distilled product of the literary original in terms of shortening, minimizing, and refining the action. With the exception of the last two paragraphs of the novel, the ending is quite similar in the film and novel. The experiences they convey are very different, though. First, in the novel, the boy is told that the family consists of a boy and a girl (this is not something he witnesses), whereas in the film, the boy and girl are clearly shown to the boy. In the novel, we are not told exactly how receptive the family is to the boy, but in the film, the mother embraces him. Weik von Mossner states that The Road (film) is not genre cinema because the ending still echoes many conventions of classic Hollywood cinema.89 The ending is much less ambivalent than the ending of the novel, in terms of the future of the boy and the family. The film strongly suggests a human union in the disguise of a nuclear family that is aimed at protecting themselves against all evil. The positively evocative music by Nick Cave at the end of the film further strengthens the argument that the the film ends on a carefully constructed positive note. What viewers take with them from the end of the film, though, is still a closure of sorts. The omission of the cosmological coda from the novel in the film is significant. Even if the film attempts to reinstate the last paragraph of the novel during the end titles, this is barely recognizable. In McSweeney’s words, Hillcoat recreates this conclusion in cinematic terms; voices can be heard along with the sounds of animals and nature, sounds that are largely absent from the film and contained only in its flashbacks. It is a threnodial lament for all that has already been lost in the world of The Road and a reminder of all that we take for granted in our own time.90

The problem is that by this time, most viewers have already left the cinema, or if they watched the film on Netflix they have already been pushed into choosing which film to watch next. We are not convinced that this way of incorporating the past, in this case not only the nonhuman past but the past as we remember it (as Peebles argues, “families at leisure on summer lawns, children playing, a sprinkler, a lawnmower, a barking dog, birds, and a call to supper”91), is especially effective when it is heard over the end titles. The placement denotes its insignificance, and the restoration of the Anthropocene world as it used to be seems very conservative and does not include the connotations of a world without humans, a world in deep time. Further, the ontological status of this coda is highly ambiguous: where do we place these sounds, as dietetic or non-diegetic? The omission of the coda in a more explicit, visual form is possibly an effect of the difference between the affordances of the two media types: while literature can easily transgress space and time and can offer a multiple selection of intertwining perspectives, the film simply cannot do the same, at least not in the context of the generic regulations that modern,

Roads to Ecological Agency

153

commercial cinema conforms to. What appears beautiful, magical, and imaginative in literature would come across as clichéd and cosmetic in film. The transition to deep, geological time, and the fantasies of the entire nonhuman world, can only be officiated by the fantasy of humans alone, because of the nonindexical semiotic space of the imaginative reader of a novel. CONCLUSION The considerable amount of critical work, reviews, essays, and popular writing on McCarthy’s novel testify to the impact it has had on many different readers around the world. Although it is outside the scope of this chapter to trace those engagements to actual activism and action, it is hard to think that the novel’s impact has not resulted in action of various kinds. The novel The Road has obviously struck a chord with many people and has reminded them of what a vulnerable world we live in, especially now that we are living in a climate emergency. The many references in the criticism of The Road to Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring show the novel’s essential position in climate fiction.92 Its potential ecological agency, thus, is not only an aftereffect of its content but also, and even more so, of the specific affordances of literature. We think Kaplan frames how the book and the film differ in the most convincing manner. She argues that “[t]hrough the use of metaphor and the power of his language, the novel is able to convey more closely than the film the negative symbiosis between humans and the natural world.”93 The novel, according to Kaplan, evokes “the mourning for nature (memory for the future) and its suffering on a different level than happens in the film”:94 while the concrete translation to meaning is not immediate, we grasp numerous sensations via the language and experience humans symbolically as they die with nature. These metaphors have power because they reveal natural beauty that once existed and its tragic loss.95 In short, for Kaplan, the embeddedness of the novel in literary tradition (she points out the novel’s biblical quality) becomes the most crucial factor in relation to the representation and mediation of climate catastrophe, which are aspects that she believes the film lacks.96 However, Kaplan describes the power of cinema as being more graphic, overwhelming, and physiological in comparison to the words of literary texts. The film “offers a political intervention in terms of effects to do with nature’s death through human impact.”97 Coda: The Climate Trail Our intermedial ecocritical method would be more than adequate for analyzing and comparing more than two ecomedia products. In fact, there is one media

154

Chapter 6

product that it would be very useful to include in this analysis: the 2019 ecogame The Climate Trail. We have refrained from including it in our comparison simply because one of the main reasons for comparing the two Road(s) is that we wanted to see whether we could tease out medial differences, in terms of ecological agency, without having to explicitly discuss two entirely different narratives. Nevertheless, The Climate Trail offers fascinating possibilities for comparison not only because it is an ecogame about the climate crisis and global warming, but because it shares many medial qualifications with the two Road-narratives and still demonstrates indisputable medial differences as an interactive digital narrative (IDN) from the media types novel and film.98 Hence, it is worth sketching out a few preliminary comparative points in this coda. The Climate Trail is a free, Windows-based graphic adventure ecogame. Like The Road-narratives, it takes place after a cataclysmic event that has happened sometime in the future, in the game called “the burn,” which has severely altered the living conditions on Earth. The player leads a group of three climate refugees and will try to steer them from the apocalyptic Atlanta in the south of the United States to the more climate stable Canada in the north. This narrative positions the game in similar territory to that of The Road(s), in a submedium of cli-fi that could be called a disaster and survival road movie. Although the goal in The Climate Trail is more specified (it is inherent in the construction of a goal-oriented game), The Road(s) similarly constructs a goal for the movement of the party of two: the ocean. The goal-oriented road movie quality is common in postapocalyptic cli-fi.99 The enticement of such narrative structures, besides creating narrative drama and excitement, is that they illustrate the sense of desperation, lostness, destabilization of society, and a search for something new and hopeful. They also symbolize a belief in human agency and their transformative and adaptive qualities of that agency.100 The sense of hope and possible closure signals a belief in human progress, which perhaps can be translated to how current debates place hope in geoscience and green capitalism. We will return to the ending of The Climate Trail, but first let us distinguish the medial qualities of this game. The Climate Trail is considered to be a “simple” game in the sense that its audiovisual appearance is not very sophisticated. It consists of a set of illustrations for different spaces and events in the game; these images are iconic and not indexical. The hint of sketches and painting in them makes them less realistic than, for example, the indexical apocalyptic images in the film The Road. One can discuss whether this lack of realism proper makes them more or less haunting. Perhaps they are more difficult to relate to because of how they become more fictionalized, but their very remediation opens up an interpretation of the uncanniness of the climate emergency. The illustrations are very similar in their layout and topical construction to the postapocalyptic

Roads to Ecological Agency

155

landscapes in The Road (film), but they have a much warmer color tone, emphasizing the heat effects of global warming. While one feels utter desolation in The Road (film) where it resembles the sensorial mode of haptic coldness, the sizzling illustrations in The Climate Trail indicate unbearable calefaction. The illustrations in the game resemble the slightly washed out postapocalyptic visions of French comic book creator Enki Bilal’s in their slightly exaggerated stylization; however, employing ligne claire (black lines) around objects makes the illustrations almost surreal (in the sense of over-real). The major visual difference between the game and the film is that The Climate Trail uses still images, which offers more time for contemplation and reflection by the gamer than the viewer of the film. Hence, the game resembles in some ways a classic graphic adventure game. The Climate Trail engages with the auditory mode via a set of soundtracks and soundscapes. Perhaps here it communicates its apocalyptic and eerie atmosphere most successfully through music with connotations either of film music that is used in cinematic Westerns (an homage to former trail stories?) or of music with a more atonal composition. Whereas the images grant the gamer a certain freedom of visual consumption, the audio is (if the sound is not muted) forced on the gamer in an almost intrusive way; one could say that it violates the fictional experience in a similar way to how the climate crisis violates humans’ future. However, the most striking medial difference between novels and films on the one hand and games on the other is, undoubtedly, the interactive possibilities within games. Games scholar Barry Atkins has called the mutual interaction between humans and games “a complex dialogue or dance with the machine.”101 As Julia Hoydis observes in her excellent essay on posthumanity in IDNs, this is a posthuman approach to this type of interaction.102 One must ask, then, what does interaction do in terms of ecological agency? In The Climate Trail, interaction is performed in a rudimentary way: the gamers are faced with multiple choices that have consequences for the outcome of the success of the climate refugee party. These can be whether to eat nurturing food or just enough to survive at a given time, or whether the party should rest or travel or look for water, food, or supplies. The choices affect the health of the different members of the party. One way of understanding the effect of interaction is to think about how it affects the agency of the player. Cameron Kunzelman singles out three formal game processes that potentially offer interventions between ecocritical issues and gamers: The first is via simulation, which holds that the conditions that generate climate change in our world can be simulated or reduced to a process that can be understood and then gamified. The second is via affect, which demonstrates that games can generate feelings or emotions around climate and climate change for players to work through in an allegorical mode. The third is via direct

156

Chapter 6

Figure 6.3  Choices offered to the player in The Climate Trail. Source: The Climate Trail. v. 2.0. Deep State Games, 2019. Mac, Windows, Linux, https://www​.theclimatetrail​.com/.

intervention, which is a unique combination of the two that provides both a simulation and the general affective register of climate change in order to allow players to both make decisions in a simulated climate and to generate affective responses to those decisions.103

The Climate Trail is not a simulation game, but it certainly engages with the other two modalities: playing the game means having a sensorial, affective experience, and more importantly, the game directly intervenes in the narrative action. The interactive disposition is also, argues Kunzelman, the most important formal category of ecogames when it comes to triggering ecological agency.104 Although Kunzelman engages in a very complex debate on this topic,105 which we cannot trace here, the consensus is that its effect relates to how our subjectivity is redefined in this dialogical relationship with a game. The interventive function, thus, “puts the player into a subjective position in a world that experiences climate change in apparent and readable ways. By performing different actions, they can directly intervene within climate change from within a subject position, testing out an array of possible actions, determining which are most effective, and then having a positive impact on the world around them.”106 Game interaction, therefore, seems to provide a different type of immersion and subjectification of the storyworld than other types of narrative media types. According to Janet H. Murray, this immersion is also a result of the satisfaction we expect, and receive, through the choices that we make when we are gaming.107 Gaming spaces, in James Paul Gee’s words, are therefore “richly designed problem spaces” or “possibility

Roads to Ecological Agency

157

spaces.”108 The satisfaction that comes from choice and results is even more important, argues Hoydis, when it comes to “morally challenging decisions,” such as those that have to be made in an ecogame.109 Alenda Y. Chang’s compelling discussion of the text-based classic adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) in “Games as Environmental Texts” supplies an interesting medial component to the discussion of interaction, intervention, and subjectification.110 Chang argues that Adventure “successfully foregrounds environment and environmental knowledge not despite, but because of, its textual limitations,” relating this to Timothy Morton’s concept of ecomimesis.111 Building on this argument, Chang suggests (according to our reading) that the audiovisual limitations of a text-based adventure game retains the ambiguity of the novel’s narrative while also keeping the highly original aspect of game interaction. Our conclusion in this respect is that the subjectification of and within the storyworld, as discussed earlier, is enhanced by the immersive media qualities that exist because of the lack of iconic or indexical semiotic material in these simple text-based games (see figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4  The start screen in Colossal Cave Adventure by Rick Adams. The lack of iconic and indexical semiotic material enhances the immersive qualities of the text-based game. Source: Rick Adams, Colossal Cave Adventure, http://www​.rickadams​.org​/adventure​/index​.htm; https://rickadams​.org​/adventure​/advent/.

158

Chapter 6

Moving away from the specific media affordances of The Climate Trail, it is important, in terms of impact, to acknowledge the ways in which this game is qualified. As Hoydis notes, the simplicity of The Climate Trail and its pedagogical, almost lecturing qualities (it begins with basic information about the climate crisis and global warming) can be traced to the market it adheres to.112 Since the game is free to use and is placed on a simple Windows platform, it is easily accessible and targets educational settings and schools. Therefore, it is important to stress that the eventual impact of cli-fi narratives and ecogames is always related to the market these narratives aim to interact with. In this case, this also relates to the experience of the player; an avid game player will most likely find The Climate Trail boring and simplistic and will quickly click through all the informative ecological parts. One might also question its effectiveness in an educational setting. Although the intersectionality of the different types of characters in the four-person party offers potential identification for diverse players, this identification, we argue, is diminished by the very aesthetic and interactive form of this game. In short, it is boring and didactic, and although the audiovisual qualities are compelling and mood creating at times, their immersive elements are low. The payoff, that is, “winning” the game, does not offer much consolation either. Whereas The Road(s) end in a highly ambivalent way, The Climate Trail ends in disaster. What is laid out as a hope for survival once the gamer arrive in Canada at the beginning of the game turns out to be a chimera: the “winner” of the game is informed that long-term life on Earth is not possible due to anthropogenic climate change. This has consequences for its ecological agency. As Hoydis observes, the twist at the end of the game exposes an “unreliable narration,” which causes a continual frustration for the gamer— “who starts to question their trust in the game narrator.”113 This general mistrust in the game plan and the overall qualifications of the game (it can be mastered and won) will probably lead to an anticlimax when the end of the game is reached. One can argue, of course, that this ending is proximate to where our world is heading and that the closure could lead to some kind of catharsis or epiphany that triggers agency. More likely than this, however, is that the player will refrain from playing ecogames altogether in the future.

NOTES 1. Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, eds. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 25.

Roads to Ecological Agency

159

2. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 96. 3. The Climate Trail, v. 2.0, Deep State Games, 2019. Mac, Windows, Linux, https://www​.theclimatetrail​.com/. 4. Quoted in Hannah Stark, “‘All These Things He Saw and Did Not See’: Witnessing the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Critical Survey 25, no. 2 (2013): 72. 5. Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Universal Pictures, 2006). 6. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Cape, 1986); The Handmaid’s Tale, seasons 1-5, created by Bruce Miller, on Hulu (MGM Television, 2017-present), https://www​.hulu​.com​/series​/the​-handmaids​-tale; The Handmaid’s Tale, music by Poul Ruders, libretto by Paul Bentley, conducted Michael Schonwandt, recorded at Danish Royal Opera, Copehnagen, 2000, Dacapo Records, https://www​.dacapo​-records​.dk​/en​/recordings​/ruders​-the​-handmaids​-tale; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); Madame Nielsen’s experimental prose series Pentagon smeltet which includes Kendsgerninger, Min fars død, and Den Højeste Orden & Underverden (København: Grif, 2022). 7. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (First National Pictures, 1921). 8. For a more detailed symbolic analysis of the father and son theme in The Road, see Fredrik Svensson, “Ideology and Symbolism in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy” (PhD diss., Karlstad University, 2020), 153–158. 9. Stark, “‘All These Things’,” 71. 10. George Monbiot, “Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?” Guardian, October 30, 2007, https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /commentisfree​/2007​/oct​/30​/comment​.books. 11. Stark, “‘All These Things’,” 73. 12. The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2004); Cuarón’s, Children of Men; Avatar, directed by James Cameron (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2009). 13. Terence McSweeney. “Each Night Is Darker—Beyond Darkness: The Environmental and Spiritual Apocalypse of The Road (2009),” Journal of Film and Video 65, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 42, https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.5406​/jfilmvideo​.65​.4​ .0042. 14. Billy J. Stratton, “‘Everything Depends on Reaching the Coast’: Inscriptions of Placelessness in John Hillcoat’s Adaptation of The Road,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 70, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 87, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10304312​.2013​.824863 15. Regarding the theme of Christianity, see Eric Pudney, “Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” English Studies 96, no. 3 (2015): 293–309, https;// doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0013838X​.2014​.​996383; for the Gothic genre, see Arthur Redding, “Apocalyptic Gothic,” in A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L. Crow (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2014), 447–460; on the function of vision/sight/blindness,

160

Chapter 6

see Stark, “All These Things”; for environmental anxiety, capitalist, and consumer criticism, see Jordan J. Dominy, “Cannibalism, Consumerism, and Profanation: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the End of Capitalism,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2015): 143–158, https://doi​.org​/10​.5325​/cormmccaj​.13​ .1​.0143; and for embodiment and emotions, see Inbar Kaminsky, “The Eternal Night of Consumer Consciousness: The Metaphorical Embodiment of Darkness in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” European Journal of American Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 1–14 and Christopher T. White, “Embodied Reading and Narrative Empathy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Studies in the Novel 47, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 532–549; ethics, see Donovan Gwinner, “‘Everything Uncoupled from its Shoring’: Quandaries of Epistemology and Ethics in The Road,” Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, edited by Sara Spurgeon (London, Continuum, 2011), 137–156; a desert novel, see Rune Graulund, “Fulcrums and Borderlands. A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Orbis litterarum, 65, no. 1 (2010): 57–78. 16. Alexa Weik von Mossner, “Afraid of the Dark and the Light: Visceralizing Ecocide in The Road and Hell,” Ecozon@ 3, no. 2 (2012): 42, https://doi​.org​/10​ .37536​/ECOZONA​.2012​.3​.2​.471. 17. Ibid., 43. 18. Anne Gjelsvik, “What Novels Can Tell That Movies Can’t Show,” in Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, eds. Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 246. 19. Stratton, “‘Everything Depends.” 20. Fiona Macmillan, “Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road,” Pólemos 9, no. 2 (2015): 331–340. 21. Stacey Peebles, “On Being Between: Apocalypse, Adaptation, McCarthy,” European Journal of American Studies 12, no. 3 (2017): 10–12. 22. See Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, eds., Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 42–45. 23. Even if literature on paper is a medium of symbolic images, and hence visual, sound is an active part of literature’s realization: when we read, we utter sounds, either explicitly or quietly within our brain. See Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard., “Synaesthesia: A Window into Perception, Thought and Language,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 12 (2001): 10. 24. For a discussion on the qualifications of these two media types, see Bruhn and Schirrmacher, Intermedial Studies, 34–38 and 49–53. 25. Seymour Chatman, “What novels can do that films can’t (And Vice Versa),” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 121–140, https://doi​.org​/10​.1086​/448091. 26. Chatman’s limitation to the visual is stunning; for example, the use of voice over can be descriptive or assertive. 27. Ibid., 132. 28. Ibid. 29. See the works of Keith Oatley, most notably, one of his recent publications, “Imaginative Creativity in Writing and Reading of Stories,” The Cambridge Handbook of Lifespan Development of Creativity, eds. Sandra W. Russ, Jessica D.

Roads to Ecological Agency

161

Hoffmann, and James C. Kaufman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 351–367; for further reading about the “creativity” of reading and medium specificity of literary fiction, see David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); Mari Hatavara et al., Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015); Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). 30. Hogan, Cognitive Science, 176. 31. See Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 27; Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 144-47; Goerge G. Hurby and Usha Goswami, “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers,” Reading Research Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April-June 2011): 256–272; Oatley, “Imaginative Creativity.” 32. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emmerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342–345. 33. Gjelsvik, “What Novels,” 248. 34. Ibid., 255. 35. Ibid., 256. 36. Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 3 (2012): 183–210. 37. Ibid., 183–184. 38. Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), viii. 39. Ibid., viii. 40. David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, “Foregrounding, Defamiliarization and Affect: Response to Literary Stories,” Poetics 22 (1994): 389–407. 41. Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017), 51. 42. Ibid., 59. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 61. 45. Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003), 176. 46. Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3. 47. Ibid., 112. 48. Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies, 51. 49. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 2. 50. Ibid. 51. George Bluestone, Novels into Film: Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1.

162

Chapter 6

52. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (U of Chicago Press, 1994), 5. See also our argument of the heteromedial perspective in chapter 1. 53. Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16. 54. Leitch, Film Adaptation, 96–98. 55. Inger-Anne Søfting, “Between Dystopia and Utopia: The Post-Apocalyptic Discourse of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” English Studies 94, no. 6 (October 2013): 711. 56. Sean Hermanson, “The End of The Road,” European Journal of American Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 1; The exception to this is, according to Hermanson, “an admirer with a taste for puzzle solving,” who offers a new interpretation, “which attempts to dispel its ‘torturous ambiguity’ and reveal a surprisingly optimistic denouement.” Ibid. He continues, “The final passage is a meditation on our enchantment with nature, lost beauty, and the connection between a thing’s preciousness and its being finite.” Ibid., 4. In his discussion of the “tortuous ambiguity,” Hermanson relies on Randall S. Wilhelm, “‘Golden Chalice, Good to House a God’: Still Life in The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (Autumn 2008): 141. 57. Ashley Kunsa, “Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 67–68. 58. Tim Edwards, “The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): 55; Jan Nordby Gretlund, “Cormac McCarthy and the American Literary Tradition: Wording the End,” in Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings, ed. Nicholas Monk (New York: Routledge, 2011), 49–50. 59. Jay Ellis, “Another Sense of Ending,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): 36. 60. Daniel Luttrell, “Prometheus Hits the Road: Revising the Myth,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 8, no. 1 (2010): 24. 61. Louis Palmer, “Full Circle: The Road Rewrites The Orchard Keeper,” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (Autumn 2008): 66. 62. Julian Barnes, The Sense of An Ending (New York, NY: Vintage International, 2011); Noël Carroll, “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135, no. 1 (2007): 1–15. 63. Stratton, “Everything Depends,” 105. 64. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2007), 304–307. 65. Smith, “Poetics,” 93. 66. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 328. 67. This is what Wolfgang Iser calls “realization” of the text. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1978), 22. 68. McCarthy, The Road, 306, our italics. 69. Stark, “All These Things,” 81.

Roads to Ecological Agency

163

70. See Rune Graulund’s discussion on the “post-historical and post-spatial” in The Road. Rune Graulund, “Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Orbis Litterarum 65, no. 1 (2010): 69. 71. The ending of the novel, a future without humans, resonates strongly with the dark and black metal ecology theories which are primarily anti-anthropocentric---the ideas of complete human extinction supersede the ideas of coexistence. For a detailed overview of dark and black metal ecology theories, see Erik van Ooijen, “The Dark Turn,” in Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes, eds. Ingemar Haag, Karin Molander Danielsson and Marie Öhman (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 101–112; For further reading, also see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Scott Wilson, ed., Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology (Winchester: Zero, 2014). 72. Adeline Johns-Putra, “‘My Job is to Take Care of You’: Climate Change, Humanity, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Modern Fiction Studies 62, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 521. 73. Ibid., 534. 74. Smith, “Poetics,” 94. 75. Stark, “All These Things,” 81. 76. Smith, “Poetics,” 94. 77. Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, 2nd ed. (Milton Park: Routledge, 2012), 77. 78. Ann E. Kaplan, “Pre-Trauma and Climate Scenarios,” in Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 57. 79. Stalker, directed by Andrej Tarkovskij (Mosfilm, 1979). 80. Stark, “All These Things,” 80. 81. Stratton, “Everything Depends,” 95. 82. Ibid., 88–93. 83. Ibid., 89. 84. Ibid., 93. 85. Weik von Mossner, “Afraid of the Dark,” 47–48. 86. Jonathan Romney, “The Waste Land,” Sight & Sound 20, no. 2 (2010): 28; Weik von Mossner, “Afraid of the Dark,” 48. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 52. 90. McSweeney, “Each Night,” 54–55. 91. Peebles, “On Being Between,” 14. 92. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 93. Kaplan, “Pre-Trauma,” 57. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid.

164

Chapter 6

96. Ibid., 58. 97. Ibid. 98. For an extensive definition of IDN, see Hartmut Koenitz et al., “INDCOR White Paper 1: A Shared Vocabulary for IDN (Interactive Digital Narratives),” ArXiv​ .o​rg (November 2020), https://arxiv​.org​/abs​/2010​.10135. 99. For example Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann: An Adventure (London: HarperCollins, 1999) and The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (London: Fourth Estate, 2005); Waterworld, directed by Kevin Reynolds (Gordon Films, 1995); Jack McDevitt, Eternity Road (New York: HarperPrism, 1998); Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004); A New Beginning, Daedalic Entertainment, 2015. Microsoft Windows, OS X, iOS. 100. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Updated Edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 101. Barry Atkins, More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 147. 102. Julia Hoydis, “Dialogues with the Machine, or Ruins of Closure and Control in Interactive Digital Narratives,” Open Library of Humanities 7, no. 2 (2021): 1–24, https://doi​.org​/10​.16995​/olh​.4695. 103. Cameron Kunzelman, “Video Games as Interventions in the Climate Disaster,” Paradoxa 31 (2020): 105. 104. Ibid., 106. 105. Ibid., 116–119. 106. Ibid., 117. 107. Murray, Hamlet, 126. 108. James Paul Gee, “Learning and Games,” in The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, ed. Katie Salen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 26. 109. Hoydis, “Dialogues,” 5. 110. Alenda Y. Chang, “Games as Environmental Texts,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 56–84. 111. Ibid., 61. Timothy Morton’s concept of ecomimesis relates to a strategy in nature writing in which the very notion of representation is problematized in terms of how the subject positions herself in relation to the natural world being described. See more in Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 112. Hoydis, “Dialogues,” 14. 113. Ibid., 15.

Afterword

The aim of this book has been to suggest a new analytical method that supplements the existing, valuable efforts made in climate change communication studies, environmental humanities, and ecocriticism. Our initial argument is that knowledge about the climate crisis must be given some kind of medial form—the concrete corpus we have called ecomedia in this book—in order to reach an audience. Thus, our method stresses that all produced knowledge about the external world, be it Western science or traditional indigenous knowledge, needs some kind of mediation. Consequently, what we study when we study science or art is how humans make sense of the world. Mediations probe tests into, or out toward a reality that we would otherwise not have access to. In more than one chapter, we are interested in what kind of ecological agency, broadly understood as the possibility not only to understand but also to act upon the climate crisis, these ecomedia may produce in audiences. These audiences are highly diversified and include scientific experts, nonprofessionals, business leaders, policymakers, and many other groups that overlap to a greater or lesser degree. Contemporary research strategies, such as the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL) and the empirical ecocriticism initiatives mentioned in chapter 2, conduct essential work to understand the actual impact on audiences when they are confronted with material that deals with the climate crisis. Contrary to these strategies, we have analyzed the media products only, but nonetheless, we have speculated on how the specific affordances of media products can affect ecological agency. One of the aims of our book, and hopefully also an important contribution to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, is to examine an unusually broad selection of different media types: our book covers so-called 165

166

Afterword

fictional and factual work, commercial and noncommercial work, digital and analogue work, visual arts, the musical and sonic modes in media, computer games, and popular science communication. Thus, this book demonstrates one of the most crucial proposals of Lars Elleström and the Växjö School of Intermedial Studies, namely that meaning-making and mediation operate in comparable if also highly distinguishable ways in all different media types. This means that while intermedial studies has the tools to study, in principle, all imaginable media products found in innumerable media types, communication varies immensely. Following a classic idea suggested by J. W. T. Mitchell, we argue that even if all media are mixed media, these media are mixed in highly differentiated ways. The systematic framework of intermedial theory provides a foundation for the analyses of all the different media types we have worked with in this book, but the communicative outcomes of these media are still complex and highly diversified. We have a background in this systematization, and we have tried to build a bridge from this systematic approach to the less systematized field of environmental humanities in general and ecocriticism more specifically. The result of the above is this book, where, after a short introductory chapter, we offered our overview of, first, intermedial studies, and then, in the following chapter, some of the major trends in ecocriticism, concluding with a description of our intermedial ecocritical method of analysis. The rigor of this three-step method should be seen as a framework for medial ecocritical analyses, but as is also evident in some of our case studies, the structure of this method is transitory and flexible rather than rigid. Nevertheless, the rigorous nature of the method is helpful when organizing the analysis, something that has also been evident when we have been teaching intermedial ecocriticism. Following the introductory chapter and the presentation of intermedial key terms, we set out the foundation of our particular version of intermedial ecocriticism. After the theoretical chapters, we provided four analytical chapters that compared different media products with a focus on specific ecological themes. In chapter 4, the chosen cases were an article by the popular science outlet CarbonBrief that we compared to the Danish 2018 novel Den afskyelige (The Abominable) by Charlotte Weitze; in chapter 5, we compared the IPCC’s “Summary for Policymakers” with a French graphic novel by Philippe Squarzoni, where the question of communicating scientific (un)certainty was our central interest. The idea of future food cultures was analyzed in chapter 5, where EAT-Lancet’s communicative strategy was set against a Swedish commercial campaign against eating meat. In the last chapter, before these concluding remarks, we stretched the format of the three-step method a bit to accommodate a somewhat philosophically inclined discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the film adaption of the novel, and then a discussion of a computer game with a similar climate change theme.

Afterword

167

We are content with the breadth of media types and products covered, although there are, naturally, limitations to what can be considered in one monograph. It is our sincere ambition to continue our intermedial ecocritical analysis to cover new areas of mediated climate crisis, but more than that, we hope that this book will inspire others to extend the method to other important and exciting ecomedia. For example, although we do include sound and music in some of our analyses, there are many contemporary ecomedia types in which sound and music play a crucial role. Independent curator-scholarmusician Heidi Hart’s Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster is one significant example of the importance of meticulously analyzing sound and music in ecomedia material.1 And there are also operas such as the dystopic The Handmaid’s Tale, which is based on Margaret Atwood’s seminal novel, and the climate-themed performance/opera Sun & Sea (Marina) that premiered during the Venice Biennale.2 Another field that we would have loved to investigate is the relevant and intelligently made soundwalks that have been produced in different forms, for instance, the Swedish podcast initiative Climaginaries.3 Whereas the three-step model is mainly a methodological choice, another distinguishing feature of our particular attempt to put an intermedial ecocritical model to work is more theoretical. Our book has navigated through the cases with a relatively strict understanding of intermedial representation, as presented in chapter 2, where we defined representation as a fundamental part of human communication and a process in which media products stand in for different material or mental phenomena, including so-called fictive and nonfictive characteristics. We have chosen examples that follow such a representational logic, but we wish to stress that although this is our choice in this particular book, it is not necessarily the only possible choice. There are very good reasons to believe that not all meaning follows the regime of representation and that not all meaning stands in for something else in the banal sense of the word representation. Novel and important work inspired by different New Materialist positions reconstructs and rethinks the concepts of representation and mediation, causing repercussions in the fields of the environmental humanities.4 From a poetry point of view, Adam Dickinson’s conceptual body of environmental poetry and his metabolic poetics are supreme examples of how we need to carefully think through the notion of representation in order to “meet the universe halfway” (to quote Karen Barad’s seminal treatise)—or, rather, to meet the ecological crisis halfway.5 In Adam Dickinson’s experimental poetry, the Anthropocene writes his body, reorganizes his genetic setup, and produces, at least partly, his poetry. Dickinson’s poetry lies at the limits of intermedial studies and therefore also at the borderline of intermedial ecocriticism, such as we conceive of it here. But that is no legitimate reason not to take it into consideration.

168

Afterword

In the end, we are optimistic that this book, that is, our theories and examples in between its covers, will be a productive contributor by establishing new ways of approaching the climate crisis. Dark times require united forces, and we are humbled by all the fabulous research on media, communication, and the climate that springs out of different disciplines and initiatives. The climate crisis requires a holistic plan of attack on all fronts, and we need to understand the complexity of the climate discourse and its impact and effect through ecomedia. NOTES 1. Heidi Hart, Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); See also sound related discussions in Jørgen Bruhn and Heidi Hart, “Melting, Blurring, Moaning. Annihilation as Narrative Adaptation to Planetary Crisis?” Diegesis (Wuppertal) 9, no. 2 (2020): 1. 2. The Handmaid’s Tale, music by Poul Ruders, libretto by Paul Bentley, conducted by Michael Schønwandt recorded at Danish Royal Opera, Copenhagen 2000, Dacapo Records, https://www​.dacapo​-records​.dk​/en​/recordings​/ruders​-the​-handmaids​-tale; Sun & Sea (Marina), music by Lina Lapelytė , libretto by Vaiva Grainytė, directed by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, presented at Venice Biennalet, 2019. 3. See Climaginaries, https://www​.climaginaries​.org/. 4. See for instance Richard Grusin’s “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124-48; or the important considerations on technologies and media representations in Sverker Sörlin and Nina Wormbs, “Environing Technologies: A Theory of Making Environment.” History and Technology 34, no. 2 (2018): 101–25, https:// doi​.org​/10​.1080​/07341512​.2018​.1548066 as well as the crucial input from material feminist positions, for instance Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). 5. Adam Dickinson, Anatomic (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2018); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Bibliography

A New Beginning. Daedalic Entertainment, 2015. Microsoft Windows, OS X, iOS. Abraham, Benjamin J. Digital Games after Climate Change. Cham: Springer, 2022. Adamson, Joni and Salma Monani. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos. New York: Routledge, 2017. Ahlner, Felix and Jordan Zlatev. “Cross-Modal Iconicity: A Cognitive Semiotic Approach to Sound Symbolism.” Sign Systems Studies 38, no. 1 (2010): 298–348. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Alkestrand, Malin. Mothers and Murderers: Adult’s Oppression of Children and Adolescents in Young Adult Dystopian Literature. Gothenburg: Makadam, 2021. Allen, Aaron S. and Kevin Dawe, eds. Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature. New York: Routledge, 2016. Andersen, Gregers. Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. New York: Routledge, 2020. Armstrong, Paul B. How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Arvidson, Mats, Mikael Askander, Lear Wierød Borčak, Signe Kjær Jensen, and Nafiseh Mousavi. “Intermedial Combinations.” In Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, 106–137. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Atkins, Barry. More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Cape, 1986. Avatar. Directed by James Cameron. Twentieth-Century Fox, 2009. Backe, Hans-Joachim. “Greenshifting Game Studies: Arguments for an Ecocritical Approach to Digital Games.” First Person Scholar, March 19, 2014. http://www​ .firstpersonscholar​.com​/greenshifting​-game​-studies/. 169

170

Bibliography

Baetens, Jan. Review of “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman. Leonardo 47, no. 3 (2014): 304. muse​.jhu​.edu​/article​/54​6282. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated Caryl Emmerson and Michael Holquist, 342–345. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Barasi, Leo. The Climate Majority: Apathy and Action in an Age of Nationalism. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2017. Barnes, Julian. The Sense of An Ending. New York, NY: Vintage International, 2011. Barry, Peter and William Welstead, eds. Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities. Manchester University Press, 2017. Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Bateman, A. John, Janina Wildfeuer, and Tuomo Hiippala. Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis; A Problem-Oriented Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017. Bencke, Ida and Jørgen Bruhn, eds. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2022. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ontology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Blancher-Cohen, Natasha. “Taking a Stance: Child Agency Across the Dimensions of Early Adolescents’ Environmental Involvement.” Environmental Education Research 14, no. 3 (2008): 257–272. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film: Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso, 2016. Bothelo, Tereso. “What Will We Eat? Food as Signifier in the Projection of Futurities in Climate Change Fiction.” In Utopian Foodways: Critical Essays, edited by Teresa Botelho, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, and José Eduardo Reis, 33–48. University of Porto Press, 2019. Boulton, Elizabeth. “Climate Change as a ‘Hyperobject’: A Critical Review of Timothy Morton’s Reframing Narrative.” Wire’s Climate Change (June, 2016): 772–785. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/wcc​.410. Bracke, Astrid. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Brenthel, Adam. “The Drowning World: The Visual Culture of Climate Change.” PhD diss., Lund University, 2016. Brereton, Pat and Victoria Gómez. “Media Students, Climate Change, and YouTube Celebrities: Readings of Dear Future Generations: Sorry Video Clip.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 385–405. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isaa021.

Bibliography

171

Bruhn, Jørgen, Ásun Lopez-Varela and Miriam De Paiva Vieira, eds. Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. New York: Palgrave, 2024. Bruhn, Jørgen and Beate Schirrmacher, eds. Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Bruhn, Jørgen and Niklas Salmose. “Intermedial ekokritik.” In Ekokritiska metoder, edited by Camilla Brudin Borg, Jørgen Bruhn, and Rikard Wingård. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2022. Bruhn, Jørgen, and Heidi Hart. “Melting, Blurring, Moaning. Annihilation as Narrative Adaptation to Planetary Crisis?” Diegesis (Wuppertal) 9, no. 2 (2020): 1–15. Bruhn, Jørgen, Niklas Salmose, Beate Schirrmacher, and Emma Tornborg. “Truthfulness and Truth Claims as Transmedial Phenomena.” In Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, 225–254. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Bruhn, Jørgen. “Heteromediality.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 225–236. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bruhn, Jørgen. “Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Anthropocene Ecological Crisis across Media and the Arts.” Ekphrasis 24, no. 2 (December 2020): 5–18. https://doi​.org​ /10​.24193​/ekphrasis​.24​.1. Bruhn, Jørgen. “Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism.” In Beyond Media Borders, Volume 2: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media, edited by Lars Elleström, 117–148. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005. Burns, Terry W., John O’Connor, and Susan M. Stocklmayer. “Science Communcation: A Contemporary Definition.” Public Understanding of Science 12, no. 2 (2003): 183–202. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/09636625030122004. Campbell, Hugh. “Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory Corporate Environmentalism, Ecological Feedbacks and the ‘Food from Somewhere’ Regime?” Agriculture and Human Values 26, no. 4 (December 2009): 309–319. Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Carroll, Noël. “Narrative Closure.” Philosophical Studies 135, no. 1 (2007): 1–15. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. 40th anniversary edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Chadwick, Amy E. “Climate Change, Health, and Communication: A Primer.” Health Communication 31, no. 6 (2016): 782–785. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10410236​.2014​ .1002030. Chadwick, Amy E. “Climate Change Communication.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Chandrasekhar, Aruna, Daisy Dunne, Josh Gabbatiss, Joe Goodman, Simon Evans, and Zizhu Zhang. “COP27: Key Outcomes Agreed at the UN Climate Talks in Sharm el-Sheikh.” CarbonBrief. November 21, 2022. https://www​ .carbonbrief​.org​/cop27​-key​-outcomes​-agreed​-at​-the​-un​-climate​-talks​-in​-sharm​ -el​-sheikh/.

172

Bibliography

Chang, Alenda Y. “Games as Environmental Texts.” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 57–84. Chang, Alenda Y. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Chatman, Seymour. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa).” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 121–140. Children of Men. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Universal Pictures, 2006. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Comfort, Suzannah Evans and Young Eun Park. “On the Field of Environmental Communication: A Systematic Review of the Peer-Reviewed Literature.” Environmental Communication 12, no. 7 (September 2018). https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /17524032​.2018​.1514315. Coop Sverige. “Dear Meat.” YouTube. September 29, 2016. https://youtu​ .be/​ -axWzQK8uqs. Coop Sverige. “Kära köttbit.” YouTube. September 15, 2016. https://youtu​ .be​ / XE54YqxrRsE. Corina Löwe. “Sköna nya värld, men vad ska vi äta?: Matmotivet i framtidsskildringar för barn och unga.” In Didiaktiska perspektiv på hållbarhetsteman i barn- och ungdomslitteratur, edited by Corina Löwe and Åsa Nilsson Skåve, 60–79. Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2020. Cornardo, Lorenzo. “WHO Withdraws Endorsement of EAT-Lancet Diet.” Nutrition Insight (2019). Corner, Adam, Chris Shaw, and Jamie Clarke. Principles for Effective Communication and Public Engagement on Climate Change: A Handbook for IPCC Authors. Oxford: Climate Outreach, 2018. https://www​.ipcc​.ch​/site​/assets​/uploads​/2017​/08​/ Climate​-Outreach​-IPCC​-communications​-handbook​.pdf. Cubitt, Sean, Salma Monani, and Stephen Rust. Ecomedia: Key Issues. New York: Routledge, 2016. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books, 1994. Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin, eds. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015. Degner, Uta and Norbert Christian Wolf. Der neue Wettstreit der Künste: Legitimation und Dominanz im Zeichen der Intermedialität. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. New York: Viking, 2009. DeLind, Laura B. “Are Local Food and the Local Food Movement Taking Us Where We Want to Go? Or Are We Hitching Our Wagons to the Wrong Stars?” Agriculture and Human Values 28 (2011): 273–283. Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg, 2017.

Bibliography

173

Dickinson, Adam. Anatomic. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2018. Dixon, Jane. “Operating Upstream and Downstream: How Supermarkets Exercise Power in the Food System.” In A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, edited by John Germov and Lauren Williams, 100–123. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Doherty, Brian and Timothy Doyle. “Beyond Borders: Transnational Politics, Social Movements and Modern Environmentalisms.” Environmental Politics 15, no. 5 (2006): 697–712. Dominy, Jordan J. “Cannibalism, Consumerism, and Profanation: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the End of Capitalism.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2015): 143–158. https://doi​.org​/10​.5325​/cormmccaj​.13​.1​.0143. Donovan, Gwinner. “‘Everything Uncoupled from its Shoring’: Quandaries of Epistemology and Ethics in The Road.” In Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, edited by Sara Spurgeon, 57–78. London: Continuum, 2011. Doyle, Timothy. Environmental Movements in Majority and Minority Worlds. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Dunne, Daisy. “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave Up to ‘100 Times More Likely’.” CarbonBrief. August 2, 2019. https://www​.carbonbrief​.org​ /climate​-change​-made​-europes​-2019​-record​-heatwave​-up​-to​-hundred​-times​-more​ -likely/. Easterlin, Nancy. “‘Loving Ourselves Best of All’: Ecocriticism and the Adapted Mind.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 37, no. 3 (2004): 1–18. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/44030043. EAT. https://eatforum​.org/. Edwards, Tim. “The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): 55–61. Eisenack, Klaus. “A Climate Change Board Game for Interdisciplinary Communication and Education.” Simulation & Gaming 44, nos. 2–3 (April-June 2012): 328–348. Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form and the Film Sense: Two Complete and Unabridged Works. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. Elisabeth, Archer Jayne, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas. “‘Soper at Oure Aller Cost’: The Politics of Food Supply in the Canterbury Tales.” The Chaucer Review 50, nos. 1–2 (2015): 1–29. https://doi​.org​/10​.5325​/chaucerrev​.50​.1​-2​.0001. Elleström, Lars, “Bridging the Gap Between Image and Metaphor Through CrossModal Iconicity: An Interdisciplinary Model.” In Dimensions of Iconicity, edited by Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer, and Christina Ljungberg, 167–190. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 2017. Elleström, Lars. “Identifying, Construing, and Bridging over Media Borders.” Scripta Uniandrade 16, no. 3 (2018): 15–30. https://doi​.org​/10​.5935​/1679​-5520​ .20180043. Elleström, Lars. “Representing the Anthropocene: Transmediation of Narratives and Truthfulness from Science to Feature Film.” Ekphrasis 24, no. 2 (December 2020): 36–48. https://doi​.org​/10​.24193​/ekphrasis​.24​.3.

174

Bibliography

Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Beyond Media Borders, Vol. 1: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media, edited by Lars Elleström, 3–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Elleström, Lars. “Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Dissimilar Media.” Palabra Clave 20, no. 3 (2017): 663–685. https://doi​.org​/10​.5294​/pacla​.2017​.20​ .3​.4. Elleström, Lars., ed Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Elleström, Lars. Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Elliot, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Elliot, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Ellis, Jay. “Another Sense of Ending.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008): 22–38. Enli, Gunn. Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Estok, Simon C. “Virtually There: ‘Aesthetic Pleasure of the First Order,’ Ecomedia, Activist Engagement.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 4-21. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isw087. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Fischler, Claude. “Food, Self and Identity.” Social Science Information 27, no. 2 (1988): 275–292. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/053901888027002005. Gail, Martino and Lawrence E. Marks. “Cross-Modal Interaction between Vision and Touch: The Role of Synesthetic Correspondence.” Perception 29 (2000): 745–754. https://doi​.org​/10​.1068​/p2984. Gallese, Vittorio and Michele Guerra. “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies.” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 3 (2012): 183–210. Gardiner, Ann. “Environmental Collapse in Comics: Reflections on Philippe Squarzoni’s Saison brune.” In The Discourses of Environmental Collapse: Imagining the End, edited by Alison E. Vogelaar, Brack W. Hale, and Alexandra Peat, 65–87. London: Routledge, 2018. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2012. Garrard, Greg. “Understanding Climate Scepticism: Global Talking Points, Local Singularities.” Augsburg Environmental Humanities Center, 2017. Gaulkin, Thomas. “Why the Bad News in the IPCC Report is Good News for Visual Learners.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. August 20, 2021. https://thebulletin​.org​ /2021​/08​/why​-the​-bad​-news​-in​-the​-ipcc​-report​-is​-good​-news​-for​-visual​-learners/. Gee, James Paul. “Learning and Games.” In The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen, 21–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Bibliography

175

Genschow, Karen. “Dissensuale Erzählungen. Der Comic als Medium der Politik bei Philippe Squarzoni.” In Closure. Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung 1 (November 2014): 51–82. http://www​.closure​.uni​-kiel​.de​/closure1​/genschow. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986. Gjelsvik, Anne. “What Novels Can Tell That Movies Can’t Show.” In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Firsvold Hanssen, 245–265. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. London: Faber, 1997. Graulund, Rune. “Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Orbis Litterarum 65, no. 1 (2010): 57–78. Gretlund, Jan Nordby. “Cormac McCarthy and the American Literary Tradition: Wording the End.” In Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings, edited by Nicholas Monk, 41–51. New York: Routledge, 2011. Grusin, Richard, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Grusin, Richard. “Radical Mediation.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–148. Guanio-Uluru, Lykke. “Imagining Climate Change: The Representation of Plants in Three Nordic Climate Fictions for Young Adults.” Children’s Literature in Education 51, no. 3 (September 2020): 411–429. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Guthman, Julie. “Can’t Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos.” Gastronomica 7 (2007): 75–79. Haigh, Laxmi, ed. “WHO Withdraws Endorsement of EAT-Lancet Diet.” Nutrition Insight. https://www​.nutritioninsight​.com​/news​/who​-withdraws​-endorsement​-of​ -eat​-lancet​-diet​.html. Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans and Sean Nixon, eds. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2013. Hannam, James. “A Brief History of Popular Science: Explaining the World Through the Ages.” In Successful Science Communication, edited by David Bennett and Richard Jennings, 37–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 575–599. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Harris, Harry. “Why a Planetary Health Diet Probably Won’t Save the World.” New Statesman, January 21, 2019. https://www​.newstatesman​.com​/politics​/health​/2019​ /01​/why​-planetary​-health​-diet​-probably​-won​-t​-save​-world.

176

Bibliography

Hart, Heidi. Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster. Cham: Springer International, 2018. Hatavara, Mari, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä, eds. Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. Heise, Ursula K. “Introduction: Planet, Species, Justice—And the Stories We Tell About Them.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. New York: Routledge, 2017. Helsing, Daniel. “The Literary Construction of the Universe: Narratives of Truth, Transcendence, and Triumph in Contemporary Anglo-American Popularizations of Physics and Astronomy.” PhD diss., Lund University, 2019. Hemsley, Melissa. Eat Green. New York: Random House, 2020. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Hermanson, Sean. “The End of The Road.” European Journal of American Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 1–12. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge, 2003. Houser, Heather. Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Howe, Joshua P. Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Hoydis, Julia. “Dialogues with the Machine, or Ruins of Closure and Control in Interactive Digital Narratives.” Open Library of Humanities 7, no. 2 (2021): 1–24. https://doi​.org​/10​.16995​/olh​.4695. Hubbell, Andrew J. and John Ryan. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities. Oxon: Routledge, 2022. Hunt, Tom. Eating for Pleasure, People and Planet. London: Kyle Books, 2020. Hunter, Ollie. 30 Easy Ways to Join the Food Revolution. New York: Rizzoli, 2020. Hurby, Goerge G. and Usha Goswami. “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers.” Reading Research Quarterly 46, no. 2 (AprilJune 2011): 256–272. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Iheka, Cajetan Nwabueze. African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. IPBES. Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, edited by Eduardo Brondizio, Sandra Diaz, Josef Settele, and Hien T. Ngo. Bonn, Germany, 2019. https://doi​.org​/10​.5281​/zenodo​.3831673. IPCC. “2021: Summary for Policymakers.” In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge

Bibliography

177

University Press. https://www​.ipcc​.ch​/report​/ar6​/wg1​/downloads​/report​/IPCC​_ AR6​_WGI​_SPM​.pdf. IPCC. “Visual Identity Guidelines.” https://wg1​.ipcc​.ch​/sites​/default​/files​/documents​ /ipcc​_visual​-identity​_guidelines​.pdf. IPCC. Global Warming of 1.5°C: IPCC Special Report on Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-industrial Levels in Context of Strengthening Response to Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty, edited by Valerie Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani et al. Cambridge University Press, 2018. https://www​.ipcc​.ch​/sr15/. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1978. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Jasanoff, Sheila, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Peterson, and Trevor Pinch, eds. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Revised ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. Jeffries, Jenny. For The Love of the Land II. Sheffield: Meze Publishing, 2022. Jeffries, Jenny. For the Love of the Land: A Cook Book to Celebrate British Farmers and their Food. Sheffield: Meze Publishing, 2020. Jensen, Signe Kjær and Martin Knust. “Media and Modalities—Music.” In Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, 56–68. London: Routledge, 2022. Johns-Putra, Adeline. “‘My Job is to Take Care of You’: Climate Change, Humanity, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Modern Fiction Studies 62, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 519–540. Jones, Anna. One Pot, One Pan, One Planet: A Greener Way to Cook for You and Your Family. New York, NY: Knopf, 2022. Jones, Naya. “‘It tastes Like Heaven’: Critical and Embodied Food Pedagogy with Black Youth in the Anthropocene.” Policy Futures in Education 17, no. 7 (December 2019): 905–923. Kaminsky, Inbar. “The Eternal Night of Consumer Consciousness: The Metaphorical Embodiment of Darkness in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” European Journal of American Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 1–14. Kaplan, Ann E. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Kirksey, Eben. The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Kittler, Pamela Goyan, Kathryn P. Sucher, and Marcia Nahikian-Nelms. Food and Culture. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2017. Knutti, Reto. “Closing the Knowledge-Action Gap in Climate Change.” One Earth 1, no. 1 (September 2019): 21–23. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.oneear​.2019​ .09​.001. Koenitz, Hartmut, Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari, Sandy Louchart, and Frank Nack. “INDCOR White Paper 1: A Shared Vocabulary for IDN (Interactive Digital Narratives).” ArXiv​.o​rg (November 2020). https://arxiv​.org​/abs​/2010​.10135.

178

Bibliography

Koenitz, Hartmut, Rachel Libeskind, Robert Preusse, and Stefanie Rau. “Glossalia: Tidings from Terrestrial Tongues.” In Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 318–325. Karlsruhe: ZKM, Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. Kropp, Cordula, Irene Antoni-Komar, and Colin Sage. Food System Transformations: Social Movements, Local Economies, Collaborative Networks. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Kukkonen, Karin. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels. West Sussex: John Wiley, 2013. Kunsa, Ashley. “Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 67–68. Kunzelman, Cameron. “Video Games as Interventions in the Climate Disaster.” Paradoxa 31 (2020): 105–122. Lagerwerf, Luuk and Daniël Verheij. “Hypertext in Online News Stories: More Control, More Appreciation.” Information Design Journal 21, no. 2 (December 2014): 164–177. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/idj​.21​.2​.07lag. Latour, Bruno and Christophe Leclercq. Reset Modernity! Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020. Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Latour, Bruno. Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2015. Lavin, Chad. Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Penguin Books, 2016. Lee, Joey J., Pinar Ceyhan, William Jordan-Cooley, and Woonhee Sung. “GREENIFY: A Real-World Action Game for Climate Change Education.” Simulation & Gaming 44, nos. 2–3 (2013): 349–365. Lee, Michael Parrish. The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. London: Springer, 2016. Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Lessing, Doris. Mara and Dann: An Adventure. London: Harper Collins, 1999. Lessing, Doris. The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. London: Fourth Estate, 2005. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Trans. with Introduction and Notes, Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Lisa, Gitelman, ed. “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Bibliography

179

Löwe, Corina and Åsa Nilsson Skåve. Didiaktiska perspektiv på hållbarhetsteman i barn- och ungdomslitteratur. Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2020. Lucas, Tamara and Richard Horton. “The 21st-Century Great Food Transformation.” The Lancet 393, no. 10170 (January 2019). Luttrell, Daniel. “Prometheus Hits The Road: Revising the Myth.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 8, no. 1 (2010): 20–33. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/42909408. Macmillan, Fiona. “Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road.” Pólemos 9, no. 2 (2015): 331–340. Madame Nielsen, Pentagon smeltet (which includes Kendsgerninger, Min fars død, and Den Højeste Orden & Underverden), København: Grif, 2022. Makai, Péter Kristóf. “A Toolkit for Intermedial Analysis of Computer Games.” In Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, 309–328. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022 Makai, Péter Kristóf. “Media and Modalities: Computer Games.” In Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, 69–85. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022 Makower, Joel. “What’s the Right Word on Climate Change.” GreenBiz, May 21, 2019. https://www​.greenbiz​.com​/article​/whats​-right​-word​-climate​-change. Malecki, Wojciech P., Bogusław Pawlowski, and Piotr Sorokowski. “Literary Fiction Influences Attitudes Toward Animal Welfare.” PLOS ONE 11, no. 12 (December 2016). https://doi​.org​/10​.1371​/journal​.pone​.0168695. Małecki, Wojciech P., Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Małgorzata Dobrowolska. “Narrating Human and Animal Oppression: Strategic Empathy and Intersectionalism in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?’.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 365–384. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/ isaa023. Małecki, Wojciech P., Bogusław Pawłowski, Piotr Sorokowski, and Anna Oleszkiewicz. “Feeling for Textual Animals: Narrative Empathy Across Species Lines.” Poetics 74, no. 101334 (June 2019): 1–8. Malm, Andreas. Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020. Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso, 2018. Malpas, Imogen. “Climate Fiction is a Vital Tool for Producing Better Planetary Futures.” The Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 1: 12–13. Mann, Michael E. The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. London: Scribe, 2021. Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Matravers, Derek. Art and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. London: Picador, 2007.

180

Bibliography

McSweeney, Terence. “Each Night Is Darker—Beyond Darkness: The Environmental and Spiritual Apocalypse of The Road (2009).” Journal of Film and Video 65, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 42–58. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.5406​/jfilmvideo​.65​.4​.0042. Mehnert, Antonia. Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature. Los Angeles: Springer Nature, 2016. Met Office. Twitter Post. July 29, 2019. https://twitter​ .com​ /metoffice​ /status​ /1155870373310849024. Miall, David S. and Don Kuiken. “Foregrounding, Defamiliarization and Affect: Response to Literary Stories.” Poetics 22 (1994): 389–407. Michon, Pascal. Rythmes, Pouvoir, Mondialisation. 2 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005. Millet, Lydia. “Zoogoing.” In I’m With the Bears, edited by Mark Martin, 35–54. London: Verso, 2011. Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mitchell, W. J. T. “There Are no Visual Media.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257–266. Mollona, Edoardo. “Computer Simulation in the Social Sciences.” Journal of Management and Governance 12 (2008): 205–211. Monbiot, George. “Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?” Guardian, October 30, 2007. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2007​/oct​/30​/comment​.books. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso, 2015. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erickson. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Moser, Susanne C. “Reflections on Climate Change Communication Research and Practice in the Second Decade of the 21st Century: What More is There to Say?” WIRE’s Climate Change 7 (2016): 345–369. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​ /wcc​.403. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Updated edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Myren-Svelstad, Per Esben. “Sustainable Literary Competence: Connecting Literature Education to Education for Sustainability.” Humanities 9, no. 4 (December 2020): 1–19. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Oatley, Keith. “Imaginative Creativity in Writing and Reading of Stories.” The Cambridge Handbook of Lifespan Development of Creativity, edited by Sandra W. Russ, Jessica D. Hoffmann, and James C. Kaufman, 351–367. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Bibliography

181

Oatley, Keith. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ooijen, Erik van. “The Dark Turn.” In Perspectives on Ecocriticism: Local Beginnings, Global Echoes, edited by Ingemar Haag, Karin Molander Danielsson, and Marie Öhman, 101–112. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Oreskes, Naomi and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Palmer, Louis. “Full Circle: The Road Rewrites The Orchard Keeper.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (Autumn 2008): 62–68. Peebles, Stacey. “On Being Between: Apocalypse, Adaptation, McCarthy.” European Journal of American Studies 12, no. 3 (2017): 1–20. Peters, John Durham. “Witnessing.” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001): 707–723. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/016344301023006002. Pettman, Dominic. Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Phillipov, Michelle. Media and Food Industries: The New Politics of Food. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. Phillipov, Michelle and Katherine Kirkwood, eds. Alternative Food Politics from the Margins to the Mainstream. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pilgeram, Ryanne and Russell Meeuf. “Good Food, Good Intentions: Where ProSustainability Arguments Get Stale in US Food Documentaries.” Environmental Communication 9 (2015): 100–117. Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pudney, Eric. “Christianity and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” English Studies 96, no. 3 (2015): 293–309. https;//doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0013838X​.2014​.​996383. Raessens, Joost. “Ecogames: Playing to Save the Planet.” In Cultural Sustainability, edited by Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl, 232–246. London: Routledge, 2018. Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002. Ramachandran, S. Vilayanur and Edward M. Hubbard. “Synaesthesia: A Window into Perception, Thought and Language.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 12 (2001): 3–34. Redding, Arthur. “Apocalyptic Gothic.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited Charles L. Crow, 447–460. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2014. Rippl, Gabriele and Lukas Etter. “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative.” In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, edited by Daniel Stein and JanNoël Thon, 191–218. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Rita, Felski. The Limits of Critique. London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. London: Orbit, 2020. Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton et al. “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Nature 461 (September 2009): 472–475. https://www​.nature​.com​/articles​/461472a. Romney, Jonathan. “The Waste Land.” Sight & Sound 20, no. 2 (2010): 28–29.

182

Bibliography

Roundtree, Aimee Kendall. Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination: How Virtual Evidence Shapes Science in the Making and in the News. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The Iowa Review 9, no. 1 (1978): 71. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubittt. Ecomedia: Key Issues. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Ryan, Marie-Laure and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Salmose, Niklas and Lars Elleström, eds. Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders. New York: Routledge, 2020. Salmose, Niklas. “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency.” In Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability, edited by Andressa Schröder, Nico Völker, and Robert A. Winkler, Tom Clucas, 239–256. London: Transcript Verlag, 2019. Salmose, Niklas. “Sensorial Aesthetics: Cross-Modal Stylistics in Modernist Fiction.” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 10 (2020): 325–335. https://doi​.org​/10​.18778​/2083​-2931​.10​.18. Salmose, Niklas. “Sensorial Aesthetics: Cross-Modal Stylistics in Modernist Fiction.” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 10 (November 2020): 321–335. https://doi​.org​/10​.18778​/2083​-2931​.10​.18. Salmose, Niklas. “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films.” Journal of Popular Culture 51 (2018): 1415–1433. Salmose, Niklas. “Three Transmediations of the Anthropocene: An Intermedial Ecocritical Reading of Facts, Sci-Fi, PopSci and Eco-horror.” In Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders, edited by Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström, 254–273. New York: Routledge, 2020. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, Abel Gustafson, Anthony Leiserowitz, Matthew H. Goldberg, Seth A. Rosenthal, and Matthew Ballew. “Environmental Literature as Persuasion: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Reading Climate Fiction.” Environmental Communication (September 2020): 1–16. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /17524032​.2020​.1814377. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Wojciech P. Małecki. “Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Texts and Environmental Methods.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 27, no. 2 (2020): 327–336. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “‘Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’Awareness of Climate Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 337–364. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isaa020. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “Disaster Movies and the ‘Peak Oil’ Movement: Does Popular Culture Encourage Eco-Apocalyptic Beliefs in the United States?” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 7, no. 3 (2013): 289–314. https://hdl​.handle​.net​/1911​/75104.

Bibliography

183

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of Readers.” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 2 (November 2018): 473–500. https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​/22011919​-7156848. Sherin, Aaris. Sustainable Thinking: Ethical Approaches to Design and Design Management. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Shi Wen, Haohuan Fu, Peinan Wang, Changfeng Chen, and Jie Xiong. “#Climatechange vs. #Globalwarming: Characterizing Two Competing Climate Discourses on Twitter with Semantic Network and Temporal Analyses.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 3 (February 2020): 1062. https://doi​.org​/10​.3390​/ijerph17031062. Simner, Julia. Synaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Sismondo, Sergio. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Smith, Eleanor. “The Poetics of Size: Rendering Apocalyptic Scale in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique 35/36 (2018): 82–98. Smith, Matthew Wilson. The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2007. Søfting, Inger-Anne. “Between Dystopia and Utopia: The Post-Apocalyptic Discourse of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” English Studies 94, no. 6 (October 2013): 704–714. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1969. Soper, Kate. “Rethinking the ‘Good Life’: The Consumer as Citizen.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 15, no. 3 (2004): 111–116. Squarzoni, Philippe. Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science. Translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger. New York: Abrams, 2014. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Timothy Corrigan, 74–88. Milton Park: Routledge, 2012. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–52. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Stalker. Directed by Andrej Tarkovskij. Mosfilm. 1979. Stark, Hannah. “‘All These Things He Saw and Did Not See’: Witnessing the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Critical Survey 25, no. 2 (2013): 71–84. Stott, Peter A., Nikolaos Christidis, Friederike E. L. Otto, Ying Sun, Jean-Paul Vanderlinden, Geert Jan Van Oldenborgh, and Robert Vautard. “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate-related Events.” WIRE’s Climate Change 7, no. 1 (2016): 23–41. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/wcc​.380. Stratton, Billy J. “‘Everything Depends on Reaching the Coast’: Inscriptions of Placelessness in John Hillcoat’s Adaptation of The Road.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 70, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 676–689. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10304312​.2013​.824863.

184

Bibliography

Svensson, Fredrik. “Ideology and Symbolism in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy.” PhD diss., Karlstad University, 2020. Sverker, Sörlin and Nina Wormbs. “Environing Technologies: A Theory of Making Environment.” History and Technology 34, no. 2 (2018): 101–125. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1080​/07341512​.2018​.1548066. Tandon, Ayesha and Roz Pidcock. “Polar Bears and Climate Change: What Does the Science Say?” CarbonBrief. December 8, 2022. Tania, Lewis and Alison Huber. “A Revolution in an Eggcup? Supermarket Wars, Celebrity Chefs, and Ethical Consumption.” Food, Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (June 2015): 294, 299. The Day After Tomorrow. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Twentieth-Century Fox, 2004. The Climate Trail. v. 2.0. Deep State Games, 2019. Mac, Windows, Linux. https:// www​.theclimatetrail​.com/. The Handmaid’s Tale, seasons 1-5. Created by Bruce Miller. Hulu. MGM Television, 2017-present. https://www​.hulu​.com​/series​/the​-handmaids​-tale. The Handmaid’s Tale. Music by Poul Ruders. Libretto by Paul Bentley. Conducted Michael Schønwandt. Recorded at Danish Royal Opera, Copehnagen, 2000, Dacapo Records. https://www​.dacapo​-records​.dk​/en​/recordings​/ruders​-the​-handmaids​-tale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. https://www​.ipcc​.ch/. The Kid. Directed by Charles Chaplin. First National Pictures, 1921. Thon, Jan-Noël. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Tigner, Amy and Allison Carruth, eds. Literature and Food Studies. London: Routledge, 2017. Tomkins, S. Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume I: The Positive Affects. London: Tavistock, 1962. Tomkins, S. Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume II: The Negative Affects. London: Tavistock, 1963. Tomkins, S. Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume III: The Negative Affects; Anger and Fear. New York: Springer Publishing, 1991. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “Literary Approaches to Food Studies: Eating the Other.” Food, Culture & Society 8, no. 2 (September 2005): 243–258. https://doi​.org​/10​ .2752​/155280105778055326. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Annual Report 2021. Geneva: OCHA, 2021. https://2021​.annualreport​.unocha​.org/. Vautard, Robert, Olivier Boucher, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Friederike Otto, Karsten Haustein, Martha M. Vogel, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Jean-Michel Soubeyroux, Michel Schneider, Agathe Drouin, Aurélien Ribes, Frank Kreienkamp, Peter Stott, and Maarten van Aalst. “Human Contribution to the Record-breaking July 2019 Heat Wave in Western Europe.” World Weather Attribution. https://www​. wor​l dwe​a the​r att​r ibution​. org​/ wp​- content​/ uploads​/ July2019heatwave​.pdf.

Bibliography

185

Waddington, David I. and Thomas Fennewald “Grim FATE: Learning About Systems Thinking in an In-Depth Climate Change Simulation.” Simulation & Gaming 49, 2 (2018): 168–194. Waszkiewicz, Agata. Delicious Pixels: Food in Games. Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. Waters, N. Colin, Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Michael Ellis, and Andrea Snelling. “A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene.” Geological Society of London 395, no. 1 (January 2014): 1–21. https://doi​.org​/10​.1144​/SP395. Waterworld, directed by Kevin Reynolds (Gordon Films, 1995); Jack McDevitt, Eternity Road (New York: HarperPrism, 1998); Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004). Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “Afraid of the Dark and the Light: Visceralizing Ecocide in The Road and Hell.” Ecozon@ 3, no. 2 (2012): 42–56. https://doi​.org​/10​.37536​ /ECOZONA​.2012​.3​.2​.471. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “Climate Change and the Dark Side of Translating Science into Popular Culture.” In The Dark Side of Translation, edited by Federico Italiano, 111–25. New York: Routledge, 2020. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Weitze, Charlotte. Den Afskyelige. Copenhagen: Samleren, 2016. Weitze, Charlotte. Klimaet og kunstneren, edited by Babette. Sorø: U Press, 2022. White, Christopher T. “Embodied Reading and Narrative Empathy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Studies in the Novel 47, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 532–549. Wickman, Chad. “Locating the Semiotic Power of Writing in Science.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 29, no. 1 (2014): 61–92. Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett et al. “Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems,” The Lancet 393, no. 10170 (January 2019). Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, ed. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Wilson, Scott, ed. Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology. Winchester: Zero, 2014. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. World Weather Attribution. “Human Contribution to the Record-breaking July 2019 Heat Wave in Western Europe.” August 2, 2019. https://www​.wor​ldwe​athe​ratt​ ribution​.org​/human​-contribution​-to​-the​-record​-breaking​-july​-2019​-heat​-wave​-in​ -western​-europe/. Yusoff, Kathryn and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” WIRE’s 2, no. 4 (2011): 516–534. https://doi./ 10.1002/wcc.117. Zapf, Hubert. “Posthumanism or Ecohumanism? Environmental Studies in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Ecohumanism 1, no. 1 (January 2022): 5–17. https:// doi​.org​/10​.33182​/joe​.v1i1​.1743. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.

Index

abilities of representation, 43, 72, 122 The Abominable (Den afskyelige), 11, 57, 66–72, 166 action, 53n40, 82, 143–44, 150, 152, 153, 156 action-oriented activities/action-oriented learning, 41–42, 50 activism/activists, 11, 55n55, 95, 112– 13, 129, 137, 141, 153 Actor Network theory, 37 adaptation/adaptation (novel to film)/ adaptation process/adaptation studies/adaptation study, 30–31, 44, 80, 135, 139, 144–45, 150 Adventure (Colossal Cave Adventure), 157 adventure (eco) game, 154–55, 157 advertising, 18, 45, 128, 141 aesthetic/aesthetics, 5–6, 9, 18, 27, 30, 40–41, 44, 49, 72, 76n19, 92, 95, 113, 126, 131n28, 136, 139, 142, 158 affect/affect studies/affect theory, 27, 33n18, 39, 140, 142, 155 affordance(s), 10, 19–20, 40, 47, 49, 61, 64, 74, 79, 104, 115, 126, 128, 141, 145, 152–53, 158, 165 “Afraid of the Dark and the Light: Visceralizing Ecocide in The Road and Hell,” 138

agency/ecological agency, 9, 10, 26, 37, 39–41, 48, 57, 65–66, 70–71, 73–74, 83, 91, 118, 120–21, 125, 129, 135– 36, 139, 141–42, 145, 151, 153–56, 158, 165 Alaimo, Stacy, 70 Alkestrand, Malin, 41 alternative food media/politics, 112, 114 ambient poetics, 41 ambiguity/ambiguous, 28, 77, 124, 149, 152, 157, 162n56 analogue photography, 78 Andersen, Gregers, 44–45 Anderson, Wes, 31 animal/animal care/animal fiction/ animal studies, 37, 42, 48, 66–67, 118 Anthropocene, 1–3, 9, 10, 44, 48, 71– 73, 126, 138, 148, 152, 167 anthropocentrism, 148, 150, 163n71 anthropogenic climate change/ anthropogenic influence, 58, 90, 148, 158 anthropological methods, 8, 111 Anthropos, 138, 149 anti-sentimentality, 145 Antoni-Komar, Irene, 110 anxieties, 1, 113, 138, 148

187

188

Index

apocalypse/apocalyptic/apocalyptic cli-fi/apocalyptic fiction, 137–38, 146–47, 154–55 Atkins, Barry, 155 attribution science, 58, 61, 65, 90 Atwood, Margaret, 136, 167 audience, 21, 24, 29, 31, 39, 86, 90, 105n5, 111, 114–15, 119, 145, 150–51, 165 audiovisual appearance/audiovisual medium, 29, 123, 127–29, 139–40, 154, 157–58 auditory, 16, 31, 76n11, 155 aural perception, 30 Austen, Jane, 80 authenticity, 114, 117, 124 authoritarian ideologies, 41 authoritative discourse/authoritative voice/narrative voice, 129, 143 authority, 93–94, 118, 124, 143, 149 autobiographical, 83–85, 95 Avatar, 138 Baetens, Jan, 8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 143 Barry Lyndon, 128 Barthes, Roland, 47 basic media/basic media type, 17–18, 22–27, 29–31, 48, 58, 67, 85, 91, 93, 118–19, 124, 140, 145 basic science, 81–82, 88 BBC, 21, 64, 79, 133n46 behaviors, 40, 42 Bertelsen, Alette, 67, 68 Bilal, Enki, 155 biographical method, 47 biosphere, 148 Blanchet-Cohen, Natasha, 40, 52n21 blockbuster, 41, 138 Bluestone, George, 144 bodies/bodily movement/body language, 16, 22–23, 25, 37, 38, 87, 167 Bothelo, Tereso, 130 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 Bracke, Astrid, 111

brand, 116, 118, 128 “A Brief History of Popular Science: Explaining the World through the Ages,” 113–14 Brothers Grimm, 17 browser, 59, 85 Buell, Lawrence, 37 business/business leaders, 2–3, 8, 89, 116, 122 camera/camera’s point of view, 78, 116, 123, 126, 142, 150 Campbell, Hugh, 112 CarbonBrief, 57–59, 61, 63–65, 67, 71–73, 75n10, 90, 166 Carruth, Allison, 111 Carson, Rachel, 17 catharsis, 158 celebrity chefs, 112, 117 CGI/CGI technology, 139, 150 Chadwick, Amy, 41 Chandler, Raymond, 30 Chang, Alenda Y., 157 Chaplin, Charlie, 136 Chatman, Seymour, 142 child/children, 6, 40, 69–70, 116, 122, 126–27, 136–38, 151–52 Children of Men, 136, 138 children’s books/paintings, 23 Christian mythology, 72, 148 cinema, 19, 21, 41, 45, 119, 139–44, 149–53 cinematic effec​ts/en​viron​ments​/mood​/ narr​ative​s/rhy​thm, 45, 125–26, 143– 44, 146, 150, 152, 155 cinematography, 143 civil movements, 39 class (identities), 109, 113, 148 classroom observations/classroom setting/classroom situations, 40–42 climate change communication studies, 9, 13n28, 36, 40, 165 climate change/consequences/effects, 1, 3, 43, 58, 71–73, 83, 85, 102, 138, 155

Index

Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science, 11, 24, 84, 93, 96–103 “Climate Change Made Europe’s 2019 Record Heatwave up to ‘100 Times More Likely,’” 57, 59, 63–64 climate crisis, 1, 5, 8–11, 15, 20, 35, 36, 41, 66, 84, 109, 111, 118, 126, 128, 135, 148, 154–55, 158, 165, 167–68 climate disaster/emergency/catastrophe, 9, 39, 53n40, 126, 133n48, 135, 138, 142, 153–54 climate fiction (cli-fi)/climate fiction novel, 41–42, 44, 57, 111, 128–29, 135, 137, 153 climate migration/climate refugees, 42, 155 climate science/communication, 23–24, 58, 61, 69, 73, 77, 81–83, 86, 90, 93, 104–5n6, 109, 124 climate scientist, 95 The Climate Trail, 136, 153–58 cognition/cognitive (level, studies, experts), 25, 39, 73, 82, 89, 139–40, 142–43 cognitive engagement, 27, 139 cognitive literary theories, 141 cognitive perception, 2 Cold War, 138 collaborative art form (film as), 149 colonialism, 111 color photos, 59 combination (intermedial), 29, 31, 49, 62–63, 70, 120, 147 comic/comic book/comic book writer, 11, 83–84, 92, 155 commercial cinema, 159 communication, 36, 167 communication channels, 17 communication of science, 82 communication strategy, 83, 86, 96 communication tool, 43 communicative efficiency, 72 computer game, 8, 19, 52n27, 129, 166 consumption (culture, food), 102, 112, 117, 124

189

contemporary ecomedia, 42, 167 content-related functions, 59 contextual dimensions, 67, 141 contiguity (indices), 28, 34n22, 67 contract (truthfulness), 69, 79, 114 convention/conventional meaning (symbols), 27–28, 49, 60, 62, 67, 85, 117, 119–20, 140 convergence, 46 cookbooks, 112–13, 117 Coop/Cooperative Union, 114–16, 119, 123–24, 126, 128 Cornado, Gian Lorenzo, 110 credibility, 78, 91, 93–95 crime fiction, 146 cross-media, 35–36, 46 cross-modal iconicity, 119 cross-modal translations, 26 cultural memories/heritage, 109, 129, 144 cultural science/cultural studies/cultural theorists/cultural theory, 3, 5, 7, 46–47, 60 curatorial adaptation/approach, 135, 145 data (points, datasets), 3, 6–9, 36, 47, 59, 61, 63, 81–83, 85–86, 88, 91–92, 140 da Vinci, Leonardo, 18 The Day After Tomorrow, 138 DDT, 114 “Dear Piece of Meat,” 111, 114–19, 123–26, 128–29 death, 1, 70, 102, 153 decolonization, 111 deep time, 148, 152 denial, 7, 81 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 27 descriptive tools/formats/analysis, 19, 28, 49, 60, 65 desktop computer, 85, 119 destruction, 1, 39, 147 diachronic aspect/diachronic perspective/diachronic relation, 29–30, 32

190

Index

diagrams, 85, 88, 120 dialogue, 122, 145, 149, 151, 155 dichotomy (human and nonhuman/ culture), 37, 148 didactic function, 40, 129, 137, 158 diegetic sounds/space, 119, 140, 144, 152 digital article/journalism/platform/text, 59, 63–64 dimensions of media, 29, 48, 59, 67 direct experience, 78, 143 dissemination (of information), 8, 36, 82, 84 distant reading, 55n56 documentary (comics), 83 documentary (film), 5, 23, 31, 112 doubt, 104 Dunne, Daisy, 57, 61, 63–64, 74 Dylan, Bob, 18 dystopia, 37, 73 dystopian literature, 41, 136 Earth, 1, 67, 79, 102, 115, 123, 126, 137, 154, 158 Eatforum​.o​rg (website), 11, 111, 113– 14, 118, 120–21, 124, 126, 128–29, 131n25 EAT-Lancet Commission, 109, 111, 113–14, 122, 125 ecocritical scholars, 37, 39 ecocriticism (description of), 35–37, 39, 41–47, 50n4, 54n52 ecofeminism, 39 ecogame, 154, 156–58 ecojustice, 39 ecological agency. See agency ecomedia/ecomedia product/ecomedia studies, 9–10, 15, 39–40, 42, 45–49, 57, 67, 153, 165, 167–68 ecomimesis, 157, 164n111 ecosystem, 3, 37 education/educational, 8, 40, 114, 141, 158 efficient communication, 19, 43, 83, 86 Eisenack, Klaus, 41 electronic device, 24, 60

Elleström, Lars, 16, 20–21, 24, 26, 30, 33n17, 166 Elliott, Kamilla, 32n9 embodied experience/embodied knowledge, 25, 139, 144, 150–51 embodiment, 25, 27, 140, 144 emergencies/emergency (ecological or climate), 9, 39, 42, 53n40, 131n28, 133n47, 135–43, 149–50, 154 emotional (ambience, attachment, bond, responses, state), 39, 125, 129, 135, 151 emotional responses, 131n28 emotions, 25–26, 120, 151, 155 empathy, 42 empirical ecocritical researchers/ empirical ecocritical work/empirical ecocriticism, 39, 42, 45, 165 ending (The Road), 127, 145–48, 152, 154, 158, 162n61 Enli, Gunn, 114 Enlightenment, 5, 19 entertainment, 17, 112, 114 environment, 1, 37, 40, 69, 110, 115, 119, 123, 132, 144, 150, 157, 167 environmental action, 41 environmental art, 3, 40 environmental communication, 5, 36, 37, 40, 55n55, 61 environmental humanities, 3, 5–7, 35– 36, 40, 45–46, 165–67 environmental movement, 37, 39 environmental politics/justice/injustice, 42, 83 environmental science, 7, 36, 83 environmental threats, 37 Estok, Simon, 46 ethics/ethical, 6, 35, 42, 110–12, 117, 123, 138 everyday (life, speech, experiences, conversations, use of media), 17, 20–22, 43, 69, 73–74, 92, 116 existential aspects/reflection, 47, 95, 102 external perception/sense organs, 25–26, 80

Index

extinction rebellion, 11 extreme heat/weather phenomenon, 60, 66 face-to-face communication, 16, 22 facial expression, 23 fairy tale, 17, 23 fantasy, 113, 142, 153 farm/farming, 117, 124, 127 fast food, 112 fatalism, 41 fears, 111, 147 feedback system (Disqus), 64 Felski, Rita, 9, 40 feminism/feminist movement, 5, 39 fictional contract, 69 fictional experience, 146, 155 fictional storyworlds, 71 fictional writing, 147 fidelity, 80, 105n5 first wave of ecocriticism, 37 Fischler, Claude, 110 flashbacks, 139–40, 145, 147, 152 focalization (novel’s), 147 food from nowhere, 112 food from somewhere, 112 Food in the Anthropocene: The EATLancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. See EAT-Lancet Commission footnotes, 59, 75n5 foregrounding, 143, 151 forest fire, 115, 126 Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, 6 free indirect discourse, 146 The French Dispatch, 31 Fridays For Future, 11 Fromm, Harold, 37 funeral march, 127 future risks, 72, 81 future scenarios/future world, 7, 11, 70, 73, 81 future world, 11, 70, 73 Gaia, 1 game interaction, 156–57

191

game narrator, 158 “Games as Environmental Texts,” 157 game studies, 41, 52n27 Garrard, Greg, 7, 39, 45, 91 gastronomy, 112 Gazelle, Vittorio, 143 gender/gendered, 109, 113 generic narrative form, 138 Genette, Gerard, 147 genre(s), 17, 84, 112–14, 124–25, 137– 38, 141, 149 genre cinema, 152 geological time, 149, 153 geopolitical, 10, 82, 138, 147 geoscience, 154 Gesamtkunstwerk, 18–19 Gitelman, Lisa, 8 Gjelsvik, Anne, 139, 143 global condition/global ecological threats, 73, 81 global food crisis/global food system, 113, 120 globalization, 150 Global North/South, 3–4, 10–11, 39 global outlook/global representation, 58, 72, 81 global sustainability, 113 global warming/global heating, 7, 43, 52, 58, 62, 65–67, 69–74, 80–81, 90, 92, 102, 105, 154–55, 158 Glotfelty, Cheryll, 37 goal-oriented game, 154 golden rule (of fiction), 71 Gomis, Melissa, 82–83 Goyan Kittler, Pamela, 110 grand narrative, 102 graph(s), 61, 88, 95, 97, 101, 137 graphic adventure game, 155 graphic layout/graphical/graphic(s), 63, 66, 82–83, 92, 104, 126, 139, 153–54 graphic novel, 77, 79, 83–86, 92–93, 95, 100, 104, 166 great food transformation, 109, 114, 125, 129 Greenberg, Clement, 19 green capitalism, 154

192

greenhouse effect, 80, 100–101 Greenpeace, 30 Guanio-Uluru, Lykke, 111 Guerra, Michele, 143 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 47 habitus, 138 The Handmaid’s Tale, 136 Hannam, James, 113–14 haptic visuality, 144 Haraway, Donna, 6, 91, 95 Harris, Harry, 110 heat effects/heat records/heat wave/ extreme heat, 58–64, 66, 69, 73–74, 102, 155 Heise, Ursula K., 35 Hemsley, Melissa, 113 heteromedial, 28–31, 49, 70, 118 Hillcoat, John, 135, 138, 146, 150–52 historical claims, 62 historical climate models, 63 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 144 holistic, 7, 40–41, 127, 168 Hollywood/Hollywood blockbusters/ Hollywood cinema, 41, 143, 152 Horace, 19 Hoydis, Julia, 155, 157–58 Hubbell, J. Andrew and John C. Ryan, 3, 5–6, 46 human agency, 40, 48, 154 human and non-human, 37, 39–40, 42, 45, 71, 112, 147–48, 151–53 human body, 22, 25, 37, 87 humanities (role of), 3, 5–7, 35–36, 40, 45–47, 74, 165–67 human life, 102, 151 human progress, 154 human scale, 72 Hunt, Tom, 113 Hunter, Ollie, 113 hybrid arts, 145 hyperlinks, 62–63, 65–66 hyperobject, 43, 54, 84, 138 hypertext, 59–60, 65, 75 hypothesis (scientific), 30, 58

Index

iconic/iconicity/iconical, 26–28, 34, 60, 62, 85, 120, 125, 140, 142, 154, 157 identification, 66, 147, 149, 158 ideology/ideological/ideologies, 17–18, 41, 82, 112, 126, 138, 148 illustration(s), 18, 37, 60, 63, 67–68, 85, 96–104, 118, 154–55 image(s), 11, 16–17, 22–23, 25–27, 29–31, 58, 60, 62–63, 65–66, 76, 78–79, 85, 87, 92–93, 95, 101–2, 115–16, 118–28, 132, 141, 143–44, 151, 154–55 imagery, 87, 117, 120, 139, 143 immersive/immersion, 19, 121, 156–58 impact (from ecomedia), 2, 9, 26, 39–42, 111, 113–17, 127, 129, 135, 137–42, 145, 147, 149, 153, 156, 158, 165, 168 indexical, 28, 34, 60, 78–79, 85, 119– 20, 140–43, 154, 157 indigenous cultures, 3, 11, 39, 165 individual experience, 62–63 industrial food practices/industrially produced food, 110, 112–13, 116–18, 123 information deficit, 83 info-wars, 11 in-house references, 64 integration (of basic media aspects), 29, 31 interaction (media), 15, 18, 20, 23, 29, 66, 92, 145 interaction/interactive (games/digital), 41, 85, 119, 121, 126, 129, 154–58 interactive digital narrative (IDN), 154 intergovernmental institution/ Intergovernmental Panel, 3, 24, 27, 58, 77, 80–94, 104 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 3, 24, 27, 58, 76–77, 80–99, 104, 166 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 3 intermedial analysis, 10, 16, 21, 27, 29, 49, 61, 70, 111, 118–19, 135, 145

Index

intermedial comparison, 57, 71 intermedial description, 47–49, 58, 78, 85–86, 118 intermedial interpretation, 47, 78 intermediality, 10, 15–18, 21 intermedial narratives, 92 intermedial phenomena, 21 intermedial reference, 30 intermedial studies, 10, 15–18, 20, 27, 36, 46–47, 83, 166–67 Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, 16 intermedial terminology/terms, 8, 17, 20, 32, 33n17, 48–49, 61–62, 141 The International Plant Protection Convention, 80 internet, 8, 23, 41, 57–59, 85 internet memes, 23 intersensorial translations, 25 intertext, 145, 147 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 136 Ivakhiv, Adrian J., 143 Jancovici, Jean Marc, 95, 98 Jeffries, Jenny, 113 Johns-Putra, Adeline, 148 Jones, Anna, 111, 113 journalism/journalistic media, 3, 5, 9, 12, 40, 64, 112 Kaplan E., Ann, 149, 153 The Kid, 136 Kjær Jensen, Signe, 120 Knust, Martin, 120 Kooperativa förbundet (Coop), 11, 114– 16, 119, 123–24, 127–28, 130 Kropp, Cordula, 110 Kubrick, Stanley, 128 Kuiken, Don, 143 Kunsa, Ashley, 145 Kunzelman, Cameron, 155–56 Lancet/EAT-Lancet report, 109–11, 113–15, 122, 125 landscape, 19, 35, 137, 141, 144, 146, 150

193

language-based model, 27 Laocoon: On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 19 Latour, Bruno, 1, 6, 13 Lee, Joey J., 41 The Left Hand of Darkness, 72 left temporal cortex, 143 Le Guin, Ursula K., 72 Leitch, Thomas, 135, 145 Lessing, G. E., 19–20 Lewis, Tania and Huber, Alison, 118 lifestyle (consumer), 112 linear story, 31 linguistic theory/linguistic signs, 27, 41, 67, 137, 143 Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, 16 literary form, 44–45 literary studies, 3, 37, 55 literature education, 40 locavore, 112–13 Lovelock, James, 11 Löwe, Corina, 41, 111 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 37 Macmillan, Fiona, 139 Madame Nielsen, 136 mainstream cinema, 150 mainstream novel, 73 Malm, Andreas, 6, 8 map(s), 58, 60, 62–64, 72–73, 146 Margulis, Lynn, 1 Marks, Laura, 144 Marx, Leo, 37 Marxism, 6 mass communication, 17 mass media, 4, 9, 40, 45, 70 material characteristics, 21, 115 material form/interface, 22 material modality, 24–26, 85, 119, 140 material object, 24 mathematical, 6, 20, 77, 91–92 McCarthy, Cormac, 135–36, 146–47, 149

194

Index

McLuhan, Marshall, 17 McSweeney, Terence, 138 meaning-making, 16, 25, 29, 31, 62, 92, 140, 144, 166 meat-based diet, 129 meat industry, 116 Media and Food Industries: The New Politics of Food, 110 media aspects, 20, 31, 48, 62, 93, 136 media characteristics, 79 media combination, 49, 62–63 medial borders, 45 medial differences, 36, 141, 145, 154 mediality, 18, 45 medial qualifications, 154 medial similarities, 104 media representation, 29–31, 70, 168 mediation, 3–5, 8, 20–22, 28, 43, 45, 77, 82, 100, 114, 143, 153–68 media transformation, 7–8, 16, 20, 29, 49, 61–62, 67, 69–70, 79–80, 88, 91–92, 104, 142 medium specificity, 18–20, 30, 47, 69, 139 Mehnert, Antonia, 42 memory, 26, 73, 125, 144, 151, 153 mental/mental activities/mental phenomena, 43, 142, 167 metafictional, 84 meteorological, 64 method-oriented approaches, 3, 5, 8, 10, 15–16, 21, 35–37, 39, 42, 44, 46–47, 65–66, 74, 83, 135, 153, 165–67 Miall, David S., 143 Michelangelo, 18 Michon, Pascal, 126 microbes, 37–38 Millet, Lydia, 48–49 Ministry of the Future, 72 Mitchell, W. J. T., 16, 21, 114, 166 mixedness (of media), 16, 21, 30, 34, 145, 166 modalities of media, 24–25, 27–29, 31, 62, 85, 115, 119–20, 129, 140, 156 Monbiot, George, 137

monomedial, 16, 44 montage, 115–16, 124, 126 mood cues, 144 Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons, 24 Moore, Thomas, 111 Mortensen, Viggo, 151 Morton, Timothy, 41 moving images, 23, 29, 31, 119–20, 143 multimodal, 16, 18, 21, 23, 26, 29, 34, 140 multispecies, 51n11 multispeciesism, 40 Murray, Janet H., 156 music/musical, 16, 18–19, 22–23, 25, 29, 119–20, 126–28, 140, 152, 155, 166–67 Myren-Svelstad, Per Esben, 40 Nahikian-Nelms, Marcia, 110 narrative action, 150, 156 narrative form, 62, 102, 138 narrative structure, 20, 102, 154 narrative voice, 116, 124, 129 narrativity/narrativization, 20, 102 natural parks, 49 natural science(s), 1, 3, 5–7, 35, 55, 57, 62, 71, 91 nature, 4, 6, 7, 37, 39–40, 124, 127, 149, 152–53, 162 nature-culture relation, 7 neoliberal politics, 83 neuroscience, 142 Never Let Me Go, 136 #TheNewEverydayFood, 116 new food media, 112 New Materialism, 37, 126, 167 new media, 8, 20, 24, 45, 61 news, 5, 8, 12, 17, 21, 23, 58–59, 61, 64–65, 80, 82, 114, 120 newspaper(s), 9, 10, 20–21, 59, 63–65, 72 NGO activism, 95 Nicole Whittington-Evans, 95 Nilsson-Skåve, Åsa, 41 Nixon, Rob, 43

Index

nonaesthetic, 16, 45 nondiegetic, 119, 140 nonfiction comics, 84 non-human, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 71, 112, 147–48, 151–53 non-profit, 8, 120–21 nonscientific public, 113 nonspecialist, 5, 61, 66, 70, 84 nonsymbolic visuality, 140 nonverbal media types, 20 nonvisual knowledge, 144 non-Western perspectives, 10, 39, 121 Nordic, 11 Norwegian Institute for Public Health, 123 novelistic, 69, 72, 146 obesity, 109, 123 objectivity (of science), 3, 70–71, 104, 121 ocean, 40, 69, 90, 92, 154 oil painting, 26, 30 olfactory, 119 One Pot, One Pan, One Planet, 113 online article, 57, 59, 61 ontology, 37, 152 oral storytelling, 20 orchestral music, 19 organic food, 116, 118 organized sound, 22–23, 25, 29 overconsumption (food), 109 ozone layer, 81 painting, 18–20, 26, 30, 154 panoramic shots, 150 paragone, 18–19 paratext, 67, 93, 95, 141 parietal cortex, 143 participation, 121, 125 pastoral, 146 pedagogy, 2, 8, 40–41, 57, 83, 111, 129, 158 Peebles, Stacey, 139, 152 peer-generated user content, 41 peer review, 78, 81 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 27–28, 60

195

Peircean, 20, 62, 85 Pentagon smeltet, 136 perception/perceptual, 19, 22, 25–26, 30, 47, 79–80, 124 performance, 19, 22, 79, 135, 167 performative, 43 personal experience, 66, 73 pesticides, 114, 117, 133 Peters, John Durham, 78 Phillipov, Michelle, 110, 112–13, 117 photograph, 16, 28, 58–60, 62–63, 65– 66, 70, 72–73, 78, 85, 87, 121–22 photography, 45, 58, 78–79 physical interaction, 85 Piano Trio in E flat Major, op. 100, 119, 127 planetary, 1, 2, 11, 58, 75, 77, 79–80, 95, 109, 121–22, 126–27, 137 player, 41, 154–56, 158 poem/poetry, 9, 18–20, 22–23, 30, 78, 128, 167 poetics, 41, 167 policies, 42, 91 policymakers, 2, 7, 8, 41, 80–83, 86–87 policy-related materials, 58 political document, 82; science, 113. See also Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) politics, 2, 81, 95; environmental, 81; neoliberal, 81; food, 112–13, 118 pollution, 30 popular climate debates, 9, 36, 61, 71, 74, 126 popular science, 8, 18, 20–21, 58, 60– 61, 66, 73–74, 111, 113–14, 120, 166 population, 109, 121–22 postapocalyptic, 136–38, 141, 147, 154–55 postapocalyptic cli-fi, 138, 154 postapocalyptic fiction, 137–38 postapocalyptic landscapes/visons, 141, 155 postcolonialism, 5, 39 postcritical reading, 40 postfactual discourse, 7

196

Index

posthuman approach, 155 posthumanist discourses, 148 posthumanity, 155 poststructuralist thinking, 5 poverty, 111, 148 power relations, 41 pragmatic understanding, 43 pre-cataclysmic communication, 137 prime-time television, 136 Principles for Effective Communication and Public Engagement on Climate Change: Handbook for IPCC Authors, 86 printed news, 63, 65 probability (formulation of), 91–92, 104 producer, 112, 114, 116–17, 124 production/design, 84; food, 109–10, 112, 117, 120; of knowledge, 5, 8; process, 78; tools, 22 propaganda, 126 propagandistic initiatives, 113 psychological states, 39, 69 public/acceptance, 42; communication, 42; dissemination, 8, 82; of science, 61; understanding, 41–42 QARS (method in empirical ecocriticism), 42–43, 53n39 qualifications, 160n24 qualifications of the media types, 124, 141, 143, 154, 158 qualified media type, 17–20, 22–24, 45–46, 61, 72, 74, 78, 92, 114–15, 118, 145 qualitative methods, 42 quantitative terms, 87 queer ecology, 39 quotes, 62, 71–72, 92 race, 109, 111 racial capitalism, 111 radicalism, 116 radio, 21, 112 raw data, 8–9, 82–83 reader, 40, 61, 85, 87, 104, 131, 137, 142–43, 147–49, 153

readership, 87 reading: aesthetic, 139, 142; close, 16, 27, 42, 47, 140; creative, 161n29; ecocritical, 136; experience, 65; fiction, 142–43; graphic novel, 93; neuroscience, 161; novel, 67; postcritical, 40; report, 93; silent, 76n11; speculative, 147; web-based publication, 58, 59, 65; written literature, 67 realism, 6, 8, 146, 154; magical, 76n17 realist politics. See realpolitik reality effect (of movies), 143 realpolitik, 81 reception studies, 9, 39, 42 reference: in comics books, 96; hypertext, 59; intermedial, 30; in web based article, 64–65, 71 relations (intermedial), 16–17, 20–21, 27, 31, 50nn3–4 relationship: environment and food, 110; human-nature, 45; human-nonhuman, 37, 39, 45, 151; nature and culture, 39; novel and film, 139; parent-child, 136–37; urbanity and food, 111 reliability of science, 82, 91 religious: imagery, 139; studies, 3 representation: of Anthropocene, 48, 50n4; apocalyptic hyperobject, 138; authenticity, 117; of climate catastrophe, in The Road (film), 153; of climate crisis, 20, 36, 43–50; cultural, 54n44; of ecological crisis, 20, 48; of environmental crisis, 20; food, 111–12; global, 81; of global warming, 43; iconic, 60; intermedial (representation), 20, 167; media, 29–31, 70. See also communication; in nature writing, 164n111; reality, 114; science (scientific research), 19, 57, 65, 72, 85; scientific, 72; truthful, 79; violence (in film and literature), 143. See also Gjelsvik, Anne; visual, 67, 145, 150, 162. See also Mitchell, W. J. T. represented media types, 30

Index

responsibility, 9, 94 risk and health communication, 40 risk management procedures, 42 ritual/ritualistic, 80, 110, 122 The Road (film), 135, 138–39, 149–53 The Road (novel), 135–38, 146–49 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 72 Ryan, John C., 3, 5–6, 46 Sachcomics (nonfiction comics), 84 Sage, Colin, 110 Saison brune, 83–86, 92–93, 95–104 Salmose, Niklas, 34n20, 41, 50n4 school, 41, 158 Schubert, Franz, 119–20, 127–28 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 7–8, 13n21, 91 science communication, 5, 9, 31, 36, 55n55, 61, 73, 75n7, 83, 86, 90, 114, 166 science fiction film, 46, 136, 138 scientific article, 5, 8, 30, 46, 49, 58, 61, 66, 71, 74, 101, 113, 120 scientific community, 11, 111–14, 125 scientific credibility, 78, 91, 93 scientific data, 8, 36, 88 scientific facts, 13, 43, 113–14, 129 scientific hypothesis/jargon, 58–66 scientific knowledge, 6–7, 95 scientific report, 23, 58, 78–79, 87, 111, 122 scientific representation, 44, 72 scientific research, 57, 61, 65, 70–71, 74, 131n25 scientific results, 3, 6–9, 74, 79, 91, 93 scientific uncertainty, 77, 82, 90 scientists, 2, 7, 81, 91, 94–95, 99, 102, 106n19, 113 screen, 58, 60, 85, 119 sculpture, 18, 20, 25 sea levels, 69, 102–3 second wave (of ecocriticism), 37 semiosis, 20, 31, 140 semiotic/s, 27; affordances, 141; aspect, 49, 60; in comic book, 85, 119; film,

197

140–41; level, 28, 120; modality, 27–28; novel, 67; processes, 20–21; relations, 85 sender, 124 sensationalism, 138 sensations, 25, 153 sense data, 28, 140 senses, 6, 16, 20, 24–26, 28, 39, 144 sensorial: aesthetics, 25, 34n20; apparatus, 25; attention, 24; experience (of a film), 139; impulses, 25; input, 26; modality, 25–26, 29, 85, 129, 140 sensory impressions, 144 sensual perception, 25 sentimentality, 136. See also antisentimentality sequence (of reading a text), 48; spatiotemporal, 59 sequential numbering, 85, 87 sequential reading, 67 sight (eyesight), 60, 67, 85, 144,159n15 sign, 27–28; function, 60, 67, 85; indexical, 78; relations, 60; system, 23, 27, 140 Silent Spring, 17–18, 37, 114, 137, 153 simulation, 7, 70, 144, 155–56, 161; game, 52n30 skepticism, 81 slow violence, 43 Smith, Eleanor, 146, 149 social: change, 3, 45, 126; construction, 114; context, 23, 28; group, 72; habits, 48; interaction, 22; media, 4, 8, 112, 114; oppression, 39; ramifications (of the ecological crisis), 42; sciences, 3, 36; scientists, 82 sociology, 19, 39 Søfting, Inger-Anne, 145 Sontag, Susan, 47 Soper, Kate, 6, 8, 113 sound effects, 119–20, 127, 140 soundtrack, 119, 125, 155 source material, 49, 142

198

Index

source media product, 30. See also media transformation; target media product source of information, 83 space, 115, 126; of article, 63, 65; diegetic, 144; fictive, 148; gaming, 156; intermedial, 26–27; material aspect, 58; subjective, 95 spatial characteristics, 26–27 spatial cognition, 143; constructions, 145; objects, 26; relations (of visualizations), 88 spatiotemporal: characteristics, 27; modality, 26–27, 85, 139; organization, 59; qualities, 119 species extinction, 48–49 speciesism, 40 speculation (of a reader), 147; about the future, 148 speculative fiction, 138 speech, 16, 23, 29; bubbles, 85; everyday, 22; organs, 25 spoken language, 72 Squarzoni, Philippe, 77, 83–85, 92–93, 95–104 Stalker, 149 Stam, Robert, 135, 149 Stark, Hannah, 137–38, 148, 150 status: of a book or author, 149; indexical (of film), 143; of a reader, 142; of science, 6 Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2 storage devices, 22; food, 109 storytelling, 150 storyworld, 70–72, 84, 138, 140, 156–57 Stratton, Billy, J., 138–39, 146, 150 structural: forms, 20; pattern, 30. See also cinematic effects; narrativity and rhythm style: aesthetic, 49; discursive, 70; graphic, 65; narrative, 147; writing, 66, 146–47 stylistic: choices (The Road novel), 137; features (linguistic foregrounding), 143

subjectification, 156–57 subjective affects, 43 subjectivity (in Climate Changed), 95; of computer games, 156 sublime, 126 submedium, 138, 141, 154 Summary for Policymakers (SPM), 80, 82, 86–92 supermarket, 115–18 Super Size Me, 112 survival, 86, 147, 154 sustainability, 50n4, 110–13 sustainable food, 109, 111, 113–14, 125–26, 128–29 Sweden, 82, 115, 119, 124–25, 128 Swedish food culture, 116, 118 symbolic, 28, 60, 62, 67, 85, 117 synchronic combination, 31 talking heads (interview), 102 target media product, 30. See also source media product Tarkovsky, Andrei, 149 taste, 26, 144 teaching, 41–42, 143 technical devices of display, 22–25, 33n17, 48, 58–59, 64, 67, 85, 118– 19, 140–41 technical terms, 61 television advertisement, 111. See also “Dear Piece of Meat” temperature, 58, 62–64, 90 temporal cortex, 143 temporalities, 147–48 terminologies, 7, 17, 20–21, 32, 33n17 text-focused theory, 44 textual choices, 88 textual limitations, 157. See also Adventure textual representations of science, 19 The Guardian, 61 theological discourses, 139 theory: Actor Network Theory, 37; affect, 25–26, 39; cognition, 39; critical, 6; cultural, 5; of emotion, 25. See also sensorial, aesthetics;

Index

intermedial, 15, 46–47, 166; linguistic, 27; media, 17; Peirce, 28; Renaissance art, 18; text-focused, 44 30 Easy Ways to Join the Food Revolution, 113 third-person pronoun, 120 threats: climate, 95; climate change, 46; ecological, 8; environmental, 37; global warming, 90; social changes, 3 three-dimensional objects, 25 Tigner, Amy, 111 time: deep, 148, 152; geological, 149; narrative, 148; of The Road (the novel), 149 timescale, 149 tone: color, 152; emotional, 138; in literature, 142 total work of art, 18–19. See also Gesamtkunstwerk tradition: of American early crime fiction, 146; diets, 110; editing, 143; food, 115–17, 122, 125, 127; literary, 153; western, 91 traditional ecological/environmental knowledge (TEK), 6, 39 transfer: of ideas and narratives, 29; of the media product, 30. See also transmediation transformation, ecological crisis, 67; media, 7–8, 16, 20, 29–32, 49, 61–62, 67, 69–70, 79–80, 88, 91–92; of scientific article, 61; of scientific data, 36, 88; of scientific work, 44 translation: (between) media forms, 8; cross-modal, 26; (to) meaning, 153 transmedial aspects, 69, 132n30; concepts (of truthfulness), 114, 118; phenomena, 105n2 transmediality, 18, 20, 28–32 transmediation, 29–31, 114, 129 Trexler, Adam, 44 tropes (in climate fiction), 135; food media, 118 truth claims, 6, 78–80, 114–15 truthful communicative form, 104

199

truthful mediation (of climate change science), 77 truthfulness, 50n4, 84, 87, 95, 105n2, 122, 124; effects (of), 86; intermedial understanding (of), 78; perception (of), 79–80; transmedial, 114–15, 118 tweet, 58, 60 Tyndall Center for Climate Research, 86 uncertainty (scientific), 82, 84–85, 90–93, 95, 106n18 United Nations, 10–11 UN report, 84 urban food cultures, 122 urbanity, 111 US agriculture, 114; market, 139 ut pictura poesis, 18–19 Växjö School of intermedial Studies, 27, 166 vegetarian cooking/food, 116, 129 verbal language, 20, 60, 62, 67, 88 video game, 30, 112, 131n16 violence (in films and literature), 139, 143. See also slow violence violent narration, 139 virtual time and space, 27 visceral quality (of The Road film), 150–51 visual art, 23, 32n9, 44, 166; choices (IPCC), 86, 88; communication, 43, 86, 88; form, 82–83, 100, 152; interface, 59; language, 92; layout, 65; material, 62–63, 65, 87; perception, 19; representation, 19, 67, 150 Visual Identity Guidelines (IPCC), 86 visualization: of data, 59–60, 87–90; of greenhouse effect, 100; of scales and proportions, 90; of scientific facts, 19; spatial and temporal, 89 Wagner, Richard, 19 Watchmen, 24

200

weather, 79, 90; phenomena, 58, 61, 66, 71 web-based publication, 58 web-only publication, 58 website: CarbonBrief, 57–59; Eatforum.org, 118–22, 124–25, 128; IPCC, 80 webtext, 59 Weik von Mossner, Alexa, 42, 45, 138– 39, 143–44, 150–52 Weitze, Charlotte, 67–68, 71, 74, 166 western: art, 18; context, 148; middle class, 113; tradition, 91; world, 10 wilderness, 37, 150 Windows (platform), 154, 158

Index

Winfrey, Oprah, 136 word-image constellations, 85, 92–93 writers, 142 written: article, 59; language, 85, 87; literature, 67; narrative, 67; text, 17–18, 48–49, 58–60, 62, 67, 92, 119–20, 140 young adults, 40, 42, 111, 122; YA cli-fi, 111 YouTube, 112, 116, 119 Zapf, Hubert, 7, 91 Žižek, Slavoj, 147 “Zoogoing,” 48–49

About the Authors

Jørgen Bruhn is professor of comparative literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He currently leads the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies in Växjö. Bruhn’s main research areas are literary theory, intermediality and media studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities. He is the editor of the Palgrave Studies of Intermediality book series. His latest monographs are The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter (2016) and, with Anne Gjelsvik, Cinema Between Media: An Intermedial Approach (2018). With Beate Schirrmacher, he co-edited Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning across Media (2022), and with Ida Bencke he co-edited Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices (2022). The Palgrave Handbook of Intermedial Studies, which Bruhn coedited with Miriam Viera and Asun Lopes-Varela, will be published in 2023. Niklas Salmose is professor of English literature at Linnaeus University and a member of Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. He has published extensively on F. Scott Fitzgerald, intermediality, transmediality, sensorial aesthetics, the cinematization and musicalization of literature, modernism, and nostalgia. Selected editorships include Once Upon a Time: Nostalgic Narratives in Transition (2018), Contemporary Nostalgia (2019), Transmediations. Communication across Media Borders (2019), Apropå Eric M. Nilsson (2019), Cultural Comets and Other Celestials (2022), Hasse & Tages filmer (2023), and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography (2024). He is on the editorial boards of Stockholm University Press and the journals Humanities and Text Matters as well as on the advisory board of the Palgrave Studies in Intermediality book series. As a co-director of the research cluster Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency (MEDEM), his research has recently turned toward the environmental humanities. 201