What is environmental media studies? - Ingenta Connect

jem 1 (1) pp. 3–13 Intellect Limited 2020

journal of environmental mediaVolume 1 Number 1

© 2020 Intellect Ltd Introductory Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jem_00001_2

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In these pages and in issues to come, we invite researchers, authors and read-ers to explore the deepening relationship between our environment, culture, and media. From the epic scales of big data and global climate change to the local specificities of personal technology use and green lifestyle politics, the twenty-first century is steadily being defined by the ubiquity of digital screens and the increasing awareness and threat of environmental instability – where the intersections fall between these, and how they shape matters of social justice, resource use and environmental communication, is the purview of our mission. We take the opportunity of introducing this inaugural issue to explore a bit further what the emerging interdisciplinary nexus of environmental media studies encompasses and where it falls in the contemporary landscape of scholarship, theory and applied study across various disciplines and their recent subfields committed to studies of the digital era.

Introduction

Environmental media studies, as both a range of topics and as shorthand for an emerging interdisciplinary subfield, refers to applied academic studies moti-vated by the need to address problems at the overlapping spheres of environ-mental issues and the production and use of new media. Environmental media

MERYL SHRIVER-RICE AND HUNTER VAUGHAN

What is environmental media

studies?

jem

Journal of Environmental Media

Intellect

10.1386/jem_00001_2

1

1

3

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© 2020 Intellect Ltd

2020

INTRODUCTORY ARTICLe

Meryl Shriver-Rice | Hunter Vaughan

4 journal of environmental media

studies examine topics such as effective environmental messaging strategies for Russian youths on smart phones, the effects of pollution from e-waste in India and the environmental ramifications of the heat generated by digital servers in Iceland. Environmental media studies brings together studies from the social sciences and the humanities, and ultimately aims to encourage a critical future where this divide is a dialogue: a dialogue that builds constructive synergy between ecocriticism and environmental communication, that forges bonds between activists of environmental justice and social scientists concerned with political ecology. As such, this subfield of media studies addresses both the academic implications and the practical ramifications of comparative, humanistic or scientific findings, when possible providing clear integrative recommendations not solely for further academic studies but also for practi-cal applications such as green policy development for corporate and industry practice, or strategic consultation for social movement media activism targeted to specific audiences and causes. Environmental media studies includes efforts to identify, assess, describe and work towards the solutions of environmental problems of the digital era – problems, ultimately, of resource use and alloca-tion, that are complicated by overarching differences in political ecology, such as access to technology and natural resources, position in processes of decolo-nization, social notions of gender and cultural concepts of Nature.

Environmental media studies is an interdisciplinary response to the dramatic escalation, over the past two decades, in the role of digital media in our personal and political lives, and in the direness and awareness of environmental threats and challenges of the Anthropocene. This field takes ‘Anthropocene’ not as a term that requires debate – whether it refers to the last 10,000 years of agrarian practices, the two centuries of western industrialization or the post-war boom in petrocapitalism – but as a given. We live in a period of accelerated climate change, mass extinction and human-induced ecological instability whose causes and consequences are unevenly distributed both within and between nations. Through situating contemporary media practices within larger cultural, technological and social histories, envi-ronmental media studies’ principal object of inquiry is the increasingly ubiqui-tous empire of connected digital devices and their use, creation and messaging capacities. These include but are not limited to participatory and Indigenous media, machine-to-machine sensors, short-form videos shared through social media, wearable artificial intelligence (AI), smart phones, augmented reality (AR) projections, virtual reality (VR) immersive experiences, online non-profit advocacy campaigns, drone-based surveillance and GPS systems, along with the vast range of infrastructures from fibre optic cables to cell towers to server farms that do not always have an obvious screen attached, but have significant environmental implications and effects.

We see five guiding principles to the definition of environmental media studies. First, the use of the term ‘media’ in this context refers to the study of digital screen culture widely, defining the digital as all that is created by the binary code of 0’s and 1’s and is transmitted electronically. Second, our use of the term ‘media’ is limited so as to avoid a number of neologisms and analogi-cal terms that, in our opinion, have the potential to obfuscate the objects of inquiry within environmental media studies; an example of this is ‘elemen-tal media’, which stretches the definition of ‘media’ to include anything that mediates (animals, air, rivers, clouds), and in doing so baffles attempts at the kind of conceptual clarity that is necessary for interdisciplinary research. Third, we employ the term ‘environmental’ to evoke the interdisciplinary purview and

Introductory Article


range of topics that make up environmental studies; as is often the practice of academic environmental studies, environmental media studies should provide recommendations for action when possible and contextualize conclusions within ranges of viable change, policy recommendations and future research and design. Fourth, studies of environmental media treat the digital as mate-rial rather than virtual: the Internet and its infrastructures exist in real spaces that use resources in measurable and destructive ways (e.g., reading this arti-cle on an iPad requires extensive precious metal mining, and may not actually be more environmentally friendly than holding the printed page in your hand if your iPad is connected to a power grid run on ‘dirty’ energy and receiving information from server farms thousands of miles away). Finally, we do not think that humanity is becoming more virtual and less real: we borrow from digital anthropology’s assertion that ‘humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital’ – it is our definition of being human that mediates what technology is for each of us, not the other way around (Horst and Miller 2012: 3, 29). In this vein, living with AR or interacting with AI does not mean that we are entering an era of the ‘post-human’ – we become neither more nor less human, humans simply live differently with different technology, and have done so through millennia. This current way of living is increasingly digi-tal, and digital media is increasingly predominant in science and environmen-tal communication – and it is our aim in the Journal of Environmental Media (JEM) to explore how this change is affecting our perceptions of and responses to environmental problems.

Disciplinary overview: From new subfields in social science to ecocriticism

If you are a scholar who attends both environmental humanities confer-ences like Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and social science conferences like the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA), you will likely notice that scholars on both sides of the humanities/social science divide are making claims that work still needs to be done on many subjects that are in fact being done, only outside of their familiar field. The sudden rise in interest in ‘Anthropocene’ topics in the environmental humanities (literature, cinema, art, philosophy) and climate change issues in the social sciences has caused an explosion of new scholarship at such a pace that specialization precludes conversation. For example, environ-mental humanities scholars offering qualitative close textual readings of films will often lament that there is no way to assess viewers’ reactions to a certain film, although there may in fact be reception studies done on that same film by social scientists. Studies in environmental communication, on the flipside, often conclude with recommendations for the further critical unpacking and qualitative analysis of the visual aesthetics associated with a particular environ-mental campaign or topic, when in fact scholarship from the humanities has provided just that, only in its own specialized methods and style. (See Strober 2011a, for further thoughts on communicating across academic divides.)

Amidst many public calls for greater interdisciplinarity at academic institu-tions (Nisbet et al. 2010), the reality of being supported to do interdisciplinary work is quite different. The manner of assessing tenure within departments often relies on certain canonized scholarly journals (sometimes with specific citation index expectations), which in turn rely on the use of certain key terms and methods, which in turn perpetuates disciplinary territorialism and tightens



the cycle of siloing departmental scholarship. Most environmental studies scholars claim to – or at least seem to desire to – live in an interdisciplinary space, and so it is unlikely that resistance to work outside one’s discipline is deliberate so much as this resistance is built into the architectural hierarchy of academic departments. To work outside of our own departmental hallways, we must begin by outlining both sides’ methods and focus areas so that, for exam-ple, humanities scholars can look for complementary work being done in the social sciences that explains why scientists rarely address the public, and social scientists can look to humanities scholars for rigorously researched historical overviews of environmental concepts. There are some logical places to start based on shared research interests, for example, the power of ‘storytelling’ for environmental causes and the role of affect, emotion and peripheral heuristics such as humour in audience engagement with environmental topics.

While we cannot claim to be comprehensive, we can trace a number of disciplinary boundaries to make sense of the diversity of disciplines tackling a wide range of subjects that fall under the umbrella of environmental media studies. The subfield currently dominating social science studies of environ-ment and media is environmental communication, which grew from the commu-nication subfield of science communication and was itself institutionalized by the Journal of Environmental Communication (started in 2007 as an extension of IECA). Before the launch of environmental communication, studies in science communication charted important areas of research including the gap between scientists and the public (Pearson et al. 1997; Besley and Nisbet 2011; Peters 2013), and its navigation by those whose role is to communicate scien-tific facts (Poliakoff and Webb 2007; MORI and Wellcome Trust 2001); the limi-tations of the deficit model (i.e. giving someone new information does not always result in changing their mind or behaviour, Sturgis and Allum 2004; Davies 2008); and the importance of storytelling, emotion and entertainment in science communication (Strange 2002; Weber 2006; Mar and Oatley 2008; Davies 2008; Markowitz et al. 2014). Perhaps of most crossover impact thus far

Figure 1: Transforming the four cultures (circles). (a) The present: the four cultures address environmental problems independently, or sometimes in pairs or triad collaborations (as illustrated by the double-sided arrows between isolated circles), which have not yet fostered sufficient action. (b) The vision: the four cultures engage fully and equally with each other (as indicated by the star symbol within overlapping circles), where novel synergies foster rapid and effective societal responses to environmental challenges. Source: Nisbet et al. (2010).



between environmental communication and media studies, and reflecting its genealogical roots in science communication, is the wide application of narra-tive frames (such as Pandora’s Box, Conflict frame, Scientific Uncertainty) to climate change communication (see Nisbet and Mooney 2007; Nisbet 2009).

Environmental communication is meant to encompass all studies of communicating environmental science, whether issues of water quality or wildlife conservation, but has become more focused in recent years on quan-titative studies of climate change communication. Many studies in environ-mental communication triangulate quantitative and qualitative methods and include studies of reception/audience, public opinion, media networks, social engagement and political activism and larger analyses tracking discursive, thematic and methodological shifts within this field. These studies employ methods that range from focus groups to public surveys, network analyses and content analyses. The recent productivity and excitement surrounding environmental communication studies have resulted in the creation of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (started by Anthony Leiserowitz 2005) and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication (started by Edward Maibaich 2007). Joint research by these centres has focused on risk perception and policy support for climate-related political action, and has developed iconic terms and approaches such as a descriptive survey of the American public’s range of climate change awareness and concern known as ‘Global Warming’s Six Americas’ (Maibach et al. 2009).

Social science disciplines attend to environmental issues according to their own strength, as each prioritizes different aspects of human life, whether the patterns of daily social media use, a single human mind, collective thought, cultural norms or social institutions. In Science and Technology Studies (STS) the social uses of technology and historical trajectories of technological inven-tion and adoption are traced to examine why, for example, electric cars were invented multiple times in multiple locations and time periods but rarely adopted. In psychological studies of environmental communication, simple rules of thumb have been prescribed for the era of accelerated climate change. Examples include the ‘finite pool of worry’ (or how many issues one can worry about at any given time) and the ‘single action bias’ (which moderates the cognitive dissonance of our everyday actions, for example allowing one to view their daily recycling as counterbalancing other environmentally irrespon-sible behaviours) (Shome and Marx 2009). More focused crossover studies between psychology and the environment have also found scholarly venues in the Journal of Environmental Psychology and Climatic Change.

As seen in both communication studies (environmental communication) and humanities disciplines (see ecocriticism below), and other social sciences, newly emerging subfields (such as digital politics, cyber anthropology, digi-tal sociology, digital humanities, etc.) make haste to confront the complex changes brought about by new technologies – we see it as no surprise that such endeavours find connection between the confrontation of contemporary technology and related environmental issues. These disciplinary innovations are leading the way in examining many new challenges of the twenty-first century such as the ways in which digital design itself encodes hierarchies and assumptions of order, the cultural relativism of digital spaces and social networks and their rules of use. Within the growing field of digital anthropol-ogy, it has been noted that ‘perhaps the most astonishing feature of digital culture is not the speed of technical innovation but rather the speed by which society takes all of these for granted and creates normative conditions for their



use’ (Horst and Miller 2012: 28). This rapid adoption of new technologies, each with their own forms of ‘netiquette’ (or online etiquette) and set of moral prin-ciples, has occurred so quickly that it is now simply considered part of being a twenty-first-century human to be chronically tethered to our digital devices and complacent in our acceptance of the cultural practices and values culti-vated through a connected existence.

Environmental communication’s turn towards issues of political identity and media use in the expression and understanding of the climate change crisis, and anthropology and sociology’s newly carved ‘digital’ offshoots mirror a similar movement in the arts and humanities over the last three decades, extending as well into the film and media studies arena that has at times been a bridge, and at times a moat, between liberal arts and social sciences. Ecocriticism, a subfield shared across the humanities (art history, modern languages, English, literary and film studies), has in many ways evolved in academia as film studies had originally grown, from the umbrella of literary and cultural studies and in the cradle of English and other liberal arts depart-ments, and is only the youngest offspring of environmental studies’ gradual foray into the humanities – or the emergence, as it is popularly known, of the ‘environmental humanities’.

Ecocriticism, so termed for its focus on environmental issues in cultural texts (including everything from the types of trees described in Jane Austen novels, to anthropocentric connotations of perspectival painting, to the depic-tion of human-nature hierarchies in Hollywood films, to the reliance on human point-of-view in first-person video games), extends the humanities’ concentration on issues of representation (how things are shown, how the world is mediated by artistic forms), cultural politics and textual analysis to the problems and politics of how ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ are depicted through literature and other arts. Just as environmental communications experts look to structural components such as sender, signal, receiver and circuit as markers of messaging strategy and efficacy, environmental humanities scholars look to historical patterns, philosophical principles and the relationship between social identity and conventions of artistic and visual aesthetics as mark-ers of how the arts both express and shape cultural values and world-views. These range from the specific environmental values expressed within national canons (Raymond Williams 1973) to how camera angles have been used to perpetuate hierarchies between social groups and, also, between humanity and non-human nature.

While literary ecocritics and critical theorists looking at environmental politics focused on specific points of intellectual and cultural history (e.g. tran-scendentalist philosophy or post-war social movements) as signposts for how literature and philosophy have been shaped by – and shaped – our relationship to the environment, the twenty-first century witnessed a strong turn towards film ecocriticism, echoing a rise in the visibility of environmental issues in mainstream journalism, television and cinema. Film and media criticism of the early 2000s unleashed a torrent of research interest and publications to meet the increasing focus on environmental issues in popular films, from block-buster effects extravaganzas like The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004) to surprise documentary hits like An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) and the subsequent advent of a film genre popularly referred to as ecocinema that includes everything from avant-garde films shot from the point of view of a river, to blue-chip BBC nature series such as Planet Earth, to feature-length fiction films across the globe (Rust et al. 2013).



Many foundational works of screen ecocriticism, or what was alternately referred to as ecomedia (Cubitt 2005), focus on issues of representation in popular moving-image culture, on how both the content of film narratives (i.e. ‘what happens’) and the connotations of formal aesthetics (i.e. ‘how it is said’) construct an image of the natural world and our relationship to it (e.g. Ingram 2004; Brereton 2005; Murray and Heumann 2009). Building such concerns into deeper philosophical explorations of moving-image meaning (Ivakhiv 2013), film ecocriticism found eager advocates both in traditional disciplinary associations such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and newer emerging venues for environmental humanities such as the Association for Studies of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and its companion journal, ISLE, and other publications such as Environmental Humanities and the online journal, Resilience.

However, these more humanities-oriented and textually based studies of film have quickly expanded to screen media other than film, and larger plat-forms of study at the intersection of resource use and materiality, environmen-tal justice and infrastructure studies. As indicated by wide-ranging collections (Starosielski and Walker 2016), the recent launch of a new online journal Media + Environment, and other recent publications, film and media studies’ interests in environmental issues have transcended traditional cinema studies to include gaming, social media practice and non-entertainment-based digital media use like that of environmental sensors and machine-to-machine learn-ing (Gabrys 2016). Meanwhile, the increasingly popular avenues of materiality studies include production culture and industry studies of the environmental ramifications of mainstream filmmaking (Bozak 2012; Kääpä 2018; Vaughan 2019), e-waste (Gabrys 2013) and other ways in which media infrastructures are reshaping the planet (Starosielski 2015), and how these industries partici-pate in a new mode of smart tech imperialism that ranges from the mining of precious metals to the outsourcing of digital waste to the orchestration of international trade agreements (Maxwell and Miller 2012; Cubitt 2016).

Among the guiding points of intersection between the many disparate fields discussed above are those of nature–society relations, and a normative political commitment to social justice in humanities-based studies of envi-ronmental justice, and to structural political change in social science stud-ies of political ecology (Perreault et al. 2015). Although attending to different scales of study, both political ecology and environmental justice highlight the struggles of marginalized populations such as religious and ethnic minorities, women, Indigenous peoples and those who nation-states label the ‘poor’. Environmentally related struggles such as access to clean water are some-times deepened by forms of ‘communication inequality’ caused in part by the unequal access to digital resources (Ryan and Brown 2015). When online spaces for resistance are possible, emerging media practices in the form of citi-zen science apps, community podcast activism and transnational participatory media projects demonstrate the power of networked publics. We encourage authors and readers to engage with a vast array of interrelated subject matters including but not limited to social movement activism through new media, historically situated social relations of production and exchange that reflect on contemporary disparities in digital resource access, precious metal mining for smart devices, and the conditions for and manifestations of alternative media and networked publics that share environmental concerns. JEM invites interdisciplinary dialogues, particularly between emerging subfields (such as ecocriticism, digital anthropology, environmental communication, etc.), that



share environmental issues, digital culture and media infrastructure as their primary foci. We welcome methodologically plural investigations seeking not just to explain environmental and social processes, but to construct alterna-tive understandings of – and practical recommendations for – more effective communication practices, more equal resource access and potential spaces for digital resistance and community-building.

Issue 1.1

Whether in political and personal terms of accountability as laid out by Adi Kuntsman, in terms of Indigenous media agency and interactive media prac-tice as revealed by Scott Mackenzie and Anna Stenport, or in terms of emotion and affect as set forth by Phaedra Pezzullo, the pages of this first issue speak directly to JEM’s principal focus on the relationship between environment issues, digital media, structures of power and social engagement. In this inau-gural issue we also pay tribute to the vast range of interests in this dynamic field, from the ecocritical genealogy of image and media history explored by Sean Cubitt to Laura Leissner’s survey study of the messaging efficacy of social media on green lifestyle politics. Similarly, as reflected in Ignacio Bergillos’ broad questioning of how we might live a more conscientious digital existence and Max Boykoff’s specific commendation on the potential of video games to broaden environmental engagement, we set out here to provide a balance of the broad and the specific, the global and the local, the history, present and future of our inescapable mediations of the environment. Whether you are a communications scholar, a critical theorist, an environmental humanist, a wildlife conservation advocate or an environmental ethicist, we hope that with this range we have provided you a place in JEM.

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Bozak, Nadia (2011), The Cinematic Footprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Brereton, Pat (2005), Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema, Bristol: Intellect Books.

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about talking to the public’, Science Communication, 29:4, pp. 413–34.Gabrys, Jennifer (2013), Digital Rubbish, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Meryl Shriver-Rice is the director of environmental media at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy at the University of Miami where she devel-oped and teaches for the Master’s programme in environment, culture and media. Her current media studies research focuses on short form digital video and the role of social media in shaping societal values and perceptions of the environment; and augmented reality, interactive media and site-specific animated projection in climate change activism in south Florida and archaeo-logical heritage sites in central Italy.

Contact: University of Colorado Boulder, 478 UCB, Armory, 1511 University Ave., Boulder, CO 80309-0478, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8166-1446

Hunter Vaughan is the environmental media Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder, College of Media, Communication, and Information. His latest book, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (2019) offers an environmental cultural history and counter-narrative to the myths, texts and ideological formations of mainstream Hollywood. He is co-PI, with Pietari Kääpä, of an AHRC grant to develop a global green media production network, linking environmental humanities, media studies, environmental scientists and activists, and social scientists in the formation of local-specific green media initiatives.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Communicating-Across-the/125769

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Communicating-Across-the/125769

mailto:E-mail: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8166-1446

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8166-1446



Contact: Abess Center for Ecosystem Science & Policy, University of Miami, Ungar Building, 1365 Memorial Drive #230, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8444-7392

Meryl Shriver-Rice and Hunter Vaughan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

mailto:E-mail: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8444-7392

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8444-7392

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